Rihanna feels "really optimistic" about new album that's definitely coming out some day

William Hughes

Feb. 22, 2025, 5:01 p.m.

Last month, we passed the nine-year anniversary of the release of Anti, Rihanna’s most recent studio album. The hopes for a hypothetical follow-up—dubbed R9 by fans, because it’d be her ninth such offering—have gone through the usual cycles in that time: Too-early speculation, shading into genuine hopes, and then into a sort of “Lucy keeps pulling the football away” amusement/exhaustion as the album has failed to materialize in favor of, say, Rihanna opting to write and record new music for her Smurfs movie. (Or launch the latest salvo of her billion-dollar fashion and cosmetics empires. Or have two kids. Rihanna’s busy, is the point.)

Now, though, the multi-hyphenate has issued one of her periodic “hold out hope” beacons to fans, in the form of a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar that touches on music surprisingly briefly. (It’s mostly about how cool Rihanna seems; she seems very cool.) When the topic of R9 comes up, it produces little in the way of concrete information, but a whole lot of ambitious platitudes that, if we said them, would obviously be us setting ourselves up for an imminent collapse under the weight of massive expectations—but we are not Rihanna.

Who’s “feeling really optimistic” about the album, stating that, “I want this. This body needs to come out, and I’m ready to go there.” What genre is it? “There’s no genre now. That’s why I waited. Every time, I was just like, ‘No, it’s not me. It’s not right. It’s not matching my growth.'” What will it sound like? “I know it’s not going to be anything that anybody expects. And it’s not going to be commercial or radio digestible. It’s going to be where my artistry deserves to be right now.” How is she managing the years of increasingly fervent speculation and the inevitable hype now attached to it? “After a while, I looked at it, and I was like, this much time away from music needs to count for the next thing everyone hears. It has to count. It has to matter. I have to show them the worth in the wait. I cannot put up anything mediocre. After waiting eight years, you might as well just wait some more.” How’s it going? “I feel like I’ve finally cracked it!”

Again: Were any of us mere mortals saying stuff like this, we might raise an eyebrow in response. But betting against Rihanna has been a profitable endeavor exactly zero times ever, so we will instead note that we, personally, can’t wait to hear Rihanna’s genre-less radio-agnostic album that easily justifies nine full years of development. We will also watch The Smurfs. We contain multitudes.