Seven years later, that has all fallen away, and its reputation has solidified as a modern pop classic, highly influential for opening the doors for major stars to make looser, stranger and more ambling records that weren’t overly retrofitted to radio play. SZA — who appears on the mood-setting opening track of “Anti” — certainly followed in its footsteps with “CTRL” and her current smash “SOS.”
But the most thrilling part of “Anti” was Rihanna’s voice, which had a new, bluesy huskiness; songs like the doo-wop-tinged “Love on the Brain” or the libidinal croak of “Higher” reveled in its raspy grain. She’d transcended the drama and placed the focus back on the music. And then, it stopped.
AT THE GOLDEN Globes last month, the host Jerrod Carmichael couldn’t help but speak to Rihanna directly when he spied her in the audience. “Rihanna, you take all the time you want on that album, girl,” he said. “Don’t let these fools on the internet pressure you into nothing.”
She was there, actually, because she did have new music — the lilting ballad “Lift Me Up” from the “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” soundtrack, nominated for original song. “Lift Me Up” is soulful, elegiac and gently haunting. It’s also an underwhelming, relatively tepid comeback. Movie theme songs don’t always knock audiences’ hair back; but for Rihanna, the expectations were high.
In its current, hypothetical state, R9 is perfect. It could be (as she hinted years ago now) an uncompromisingly sprawling reggae album. Perhaps it’s a tight, no-filler return to Rihanna’s days of aerodynamically engineered pop bangers. Maybe the guest list is stacked; maybe the album has no features at all. It’s everything to everyone, because it is not yet anything at all.
Her Super Bowl performance, too, is currently charged with a similar sense of dazzling possibility. Will Rihanna’s live comeback be a tantalizing introduction to her next era, or a nostalgic look back at her history-making hits that leaves people wanting more? All that’s left to do is, well, exactly what we’ve been doing all along: wait (a little longer) for Rihanna.
Audio produced by Kate Winslett.