Rihanna has celebrated nine years since she shared her last studio album ‘ANTI’.
- READ MORE: Rihanna: every album ranked and rated
The singer and business mogul took to Instagram yesterday (January 28) to mark her last studio LP turning one year shy of a decade.
She posted a compilation video to celebrate the milestone, featuring both clips from her music videos and footage of her performances around 2016. She also shared the clip with the song ‘Consideration’ playing over the top – the opening track for ‘ANTI’ which featured a collaboration with SZA.
“Happy ANTIVersary” she wrote in the caption. Check it out below.
The record featured huge hits like ‘Kiss It Better’ and ‘Work’, and topped the Billboard charts for two weeks. It went on to remain on the charts for an impressive 456 weeks.
She has yet to release another album, but has shared two songs since then. The last was the 2022 release ‘Lift Me Up’, the lead single to the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack and a tribute to late actor Chadwick Boseman.
Although Ri has turned her sights predominantly to her Fenty empire over past years, there have been increasing demands from fans for new music.
Hopes for a new record first got momentum in 2018, when Ri began hinting at new material and promised followers that it would arrive in 2019. That year, she also captioned a video of a dog dancing to House Of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’ with the message “Me listening to R9 by myself and refusing to release it.”
In 2020, however, she put a dampener on the hopes for the album when she told fans to stop asking her to release new material during the pandemic.
The project, which does not yet have a title and continues to be dubbed ‘R9’ by fans, got another update in October 2023, when Entertainment Tonight shared an update and reported that Rihanna was planning her musical return, signed a deal with Live Nation and was looking to go on a world tour from 2024-2025.
In December that year, Rihanna took the rumours one step further, teasing on the red carpet that there may be new music and a world tour on the horizon.
As for updates in 2024, the singer’s partner A$AP Rocky confirmed in February that Rihanna was still “working on” the long-awaited album, but Rihanna addressed her future in music at a Fenty launch party in her Barbados hometown, saying the delay comes as “God had other plans for me.”
Back in 2015, Rihanna spoke to NME in an exclusive interview and explained why three of her singles at the time – ‘American Oxygen’, ‘Four Five Seconds’, ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ – had such different sounds.
“I love what I love, and these songs each have their own demeanour, and the videos reflect the character of each song,” she said. “I want every video to take you on a different journey. A different ride.”
“I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic,” she continued. “If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life.
“A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it. You can’t stand behind something you don’t believe in. You can pretend for a little while, but there’s always going to be resentment. I can be who I am and sleep at night, knowing there’s no pressure to be anything else.”
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