You can't rush brilliance, and that's absolutely true of Rihanna's much-requested, upcoming album. In fact, fans routinely harass RiRi on Instagram, so much so that journalists have penned entire articles about it.
Rihanna herself isn't keen on the bullying from fans. After all, she's already churned out a ton of record-making hits, so why the big rush?
Well, as Vogue UK recapped last year, Rihanna is big on social media. Fans everywhere are constantly drooling over her, and as of 2020, her reach was 2.9 billion via a combination of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Just think of the sales potential an entire album could bring to Rihanna's team?
But the catch is, Rihanna is taking her sweet time. In that interview with Vogue, she talked about her upcoming album, the first to be released since 2016's 'Anti.' Her studio is calling it simply 'R9,' because it hasn't been named yet.
But Rihanna explained that she was "aggressively working on music" back then, and it's possible a drop could be coming any day now. Well, maybe.
The thing is, Rihanna doesn't appreciate the prodding from fans, especially because her last album has been hanging on the Billboard 200 for a full five years at this point. One fan obnoxiously commented, "celebrate by releasing a song" when Rihanna shared the momentous milestone on Instagram.
In her own time, Rihanna promises she'll top all of her past work, partly because she has "no rules" and "no format" for this upcoming piece.
Rihanna explicitly said she's not going for any one vibe or considering any boundaries for her next album, per Vogue, and that she's "done all the hits... tried every genre" and now, finally, she can "make anything" she wants.
When the interviewer cautiously questioned whether the album won't be a reggae-inspired one -- as they were hoping for -- Rihanna admitted that "that is happening," so perhaps there are some parts of the album that fans won't be surprised by. Then again, Rihanna has kept more than a few things hidden over the years. For one thing, bowing out of the Grammys in 2016 was less about her being sick and more about her nerves.
But fans shouldn't count Rihanna out just yet. After all, she may not have released new music in the last few years. But she has been running two brands, Savage x Fenty and her Fenty Beauty brand, both of which are insanely popular (and lucrative).
Though fans seem annoyed that Rihanna's not all about delivering them the tunes they feel they deserve, she's clearly doing things on her own time, and the end result will no doubt be worth the wait.