West enlisted guest vocals for the album from The-Dream, Kelly Price, Chance the Rapper, Kirk Franklin, Kid Cudi, Desiigner, Rihanna, Young Thug, Chris Brown, the Weeknd, Ty Dolla Sign, Vic Mensa, Sia, Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar, Post Malone, and Sampha.

[22] In March 2015, during an interview with MTV, promoting his third studio album Dark Sky Paradise (2015), Big Sean spoke about the multiple recording locations involved in The Life of Pablo including Mexico and Hawaii.

[23] In an October 2015 interview with The Fader, Post Malone, who is featured on the track "Fade" with Ty Dolla Sign, discussed his experiences with West describing him as "just a normal guy, like me, and super cool".

The updated track listing included a number of unannounced potential collaborators: Earl Sweatshirt, The-Dream, Tyler, the Creator, The World Famous Tony Williams, Diddy, Danny!,[25] ASAP Rocky, Kid Cudi, Lil Uzi Vert, Drake, Teyana Taylor, Zoë Kravitz, Bibi Bourelly, Doug E. Fresh, How to Dress Well, and French Montana, as well as a return of his frequent production collaborators, such as Mike Dean, Hudson Mohawke, Plain Pat, Vicious, Anthony Kilhoffer, A-Trak, and Noah Goldstein.

"[34] Following The Life of Pablo's initial Tidal release, West said he intended to continue altering the songs, declaring the album a "living breathing changing creative expression".

[35] On March 13, 2016, over a month after the release, West uploaded an updated version of "Famous", swapping out the lyric "She be Puerto Rican day parade wavin'" for "She in school to be a real estate agent", as well as making slight tweaks to the overall mix.

[43] He claimed West was "seeing how far he can stretch the point right now, in a way no pop star has ever quite tried", describing him as "testing the shifting state of the 'album cycle' to see if he can break it entirely, making his album like another piece of software on your phone that sends you push updates".

[43] Winston Cook-Wilson of Inverse described the album as "a fluid construct", writing that "as a way of holding the public's attention span, Kanye's choice to continue to tweak The Life is Pablo indefinitely is genius".

[47] Brian Welk and Ross A. Lincoln from TheWrap claimed West should have ended the updates after his initial changes to The Life of Pablo three days after its release.

"[49] The Life of Pablo was noted by Entertainment Weekly's Madison Vain for its "raw, occasionally even intentionally messy, composition" in contrast to West's previous albums.

[50] Compared to his pre-Yeezus work, Robert Yaniz Jr of Cheat Sheet viewed the album as West taking on a sound that is not as accessible and "more self-indulgent".

[52] Carl Wilson of Slate suggested that with the given context of the sonic landscaping throughout The Life of Pablo, the point is that "in West's kamikaze, mood-swinging way, Pablo now seems undeniably (not half-assedly, as I'd been about to conclude) like an album of struggle", noting the strange connections that it created "between Kanye's many iterations—soul-sample enthusiast, heartbroken Auto-Tune crooner, hedonistic avant-pop composer, industrial-rap shit-talker" while making use of bass and percussion lines "that are only the tail-end decay of some lost starting place, some vanished rhythmic Eden".

[64] McCormick described West as "constantly veering between swaggering bravado and insecurity bordering on paranoia, smashing the sacred against the profane and disrupting his own flowing grooves with interjections".

[63] God and his connection to spirituality are referenced within "Low Lights", with the vocals coming from an unknown woman delivering a sample of Sandy Rivera's performance on the a cappella version of "Save Me" by the duo Kings of Tomorrow.

[52] The song features the lyrics "Cover Nori in lamb's wool/We surrounded by/The fuckin wolves", used by West to offer an image of him and Kardashian as the biblical figures Mary and Joseph.

[9][81] As well as debuting the song, West shared a snippet of the forthcoming GOOD Friday release, titled "No More Parties in LA", which features vocals by Kendrick Lamar.

[88] After an active weekend, during which he was finishing The Life of Pablo, West stated he had $53,000,000 in personal debt and called for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to invest $1 billion in his ideas.

2" were released as separate tracks on the album, both parts of the song were serviced to radio stations across the United States as the second single, "Father Stretch My Hands", on June 7.

[111] The release onto other streaming platforms, along with West's claims that the album would remain a permanent Tidal "exclusive" prompted a lawsuit to be filed on April 18, 2016, by law firm Edelson PC.

[123] De Potter's level of fame at the time was not as great as that of artists such as George Condo and Takashi Murakami, who had previously designed cover art for West.

[125] West shared another cover for The Life of Pablo on the same date with the phrase "which one" on it that was included on the notepad of the final track list, and a cropped photo of British model Sheniz Halil that shows her buttocks;[126][127] this artwork was used for the official release.

[52] Corbin Reiff opined that The Life of Pablo "feels far different from any of the tightly constructed, singular works of West's past", asserting instead that "as a beautiful, messy, mixed-up collection of 18 songs, it's a brilliant document".

[139] In a highly positive review, Jayson Greene wrote that all of West's work is animated by "a madcap sense of humor", and claimed "The Life of Pablo has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography", finding that it manages to come across "as both his most labored-over and unfinished album, full of asterisks and corrections and footnotes".

[57] Robert Christgau of Vice found the record "wittingly casual and easy on the ears", writing that, "unlike Yeezus, it won't top many 2016 lists—it's too blatantly imperfect, too flagrantly unfocused.

[138] Spin's Greg Tate wrote that "even if Mr. West feels (for now, at least) that his best years as a rap superstar are behind him, there's still hella great beats roaming around that dazed and befuddling noggin per The Life of Pablo for dang sure" and described the album as "long on musical confidence and short on inspirational verses".

[137] Ray Rahman was less enthusiastic, calling The Life of Pablo "an ambitious album that finds the rapper struggling to compact his many identities into one weird, uncomfortable, glorious whole".

[135] Neil McCormick wrote, "The Life of Pablo is certainly rich in musical scope, chock a block with inspired ideas", but he felt the work to be "so self-involved it crosses over into self-delusion, marked by such a tangible absence of perspective and objectivity".

[54] In a mixed review, Greg Kot expressed the viewpoint that "The Life of Pablo sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished album", though he claimed that "West comes off as a man with hundreds of ideas in play all at once" who lacks any filter.

[160] After being made available solely on Tidal, The Life of Pablo failed to chart initially because West declined to share the streaming numbers with Nielsen Music.

[164] In May 2018, the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv published an investigative report that accused Tidal of manipulating Beyonce's Lemonade and Kanye West's Life of Pablo streaming numbers.