In January 2016, when Rihanna launched her most up-to-date album, the eclectic, intimate “Anti,” Barack Obama was president, Prince was nonetheless alive and TikTok didn’t but exist.
Rihanna, as soon as one in every of pop’s most dependable hitmakers and the star of Sunday’s Tremendous Bowl halftime present, has since been busy with extremely profitable magnificence and style firms and have become, in keeping with Forbes, the youngest self-made feminine billionaire. She has sometimes featured on different artists’ songs and recorded two tracks for the “Black Panther: Wakanda Perpetually” soundtrack. However the launch date of her subsequent album has been pushed again in perpetuity.
Rihanna, a social media pure, has been significantly adept at taking part in together with followers’ agonizing ready sport. Pining for “R9” (as her subsequent LP is thought) has steadily reworked from an earnest want to an web punchline to a power existential situation — the “Ready for Godot” of pop music.
However the backside line is extra severe: Due to the size of Rihanna’s hiatus, the stakes for her return continue to grow. For a star with 14 No. 1 tracks on Billboard’s Scorching 100 — and 63 songs on the chart up to now — a middling return may very well be tantamount to a flop.
Rihanna has been pop’s poster woman of extended hiatus for therefore lengthy that it’s straightforward to neglect she was once an emblem of its reverse: the grind of relentless productiveness. Within the eight years from 2005 to 2012, she launched a staggering seven albums. All of them went at the least platinum. When her saucy “S&M” topped the Billboard Scorching 100 in April 2011, she set the file for the quickest solo artist to rack up 10 No. 1 singles. Solely the Beatles did it faster.
In her time away from music, Rihanna has offered sufficient fan service to maintain the flame glowing, with out truly revealing a lot. Her mystique has ballooned in absentia, permitting folks to venture onto her seemingly contradictory concepts. She is the whole lot to everybody, the exception to each rule.
In its present, hypothetical state, “R9” is ideal. It may very well be (as she hinted years in the past now) an uncompromisingly sprawling reggae album. Maybe it’s a decent, no-filler return to Rihanna’s days of aerodynamically engineered pop bangers. Possibly the visitor checklist is stacked; perhaps the album has no options in any respect. It’s the whole lot to everybody, as a result of it isn’t but something in any respect.
Her Tremendous Bowl efficiency, too, is at the moment charged with an analogous sense of dazzling risk. Will Rihanna’s stay comeback be a tantalizing introduction to her subsequent period, or a nostalgic look again at her history-making hits that leaves folks wanting extra? All that’s left to do is, effectively, precisely what we’ve been doing all alongside: wait (a bit longer) for Rihanna.