![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() One year ago, on one-off single “FourFiveSeconds,” she belted in a raw, raspy tone that expressed levels of soul the previous decade of her career had only hinted at. “You been rollin’ around/Shit, I’m rollin’ up,” she asserts on the biting kiss-off track “Needed Me.” Clearly, the stoned party goddess we’ve seen on Instagram and Snapchat is pretty close to the real Rihanna.Īnti‘s beats are more muted than the flashier productions of her past work, which leaves room for the album’s biggest revelation: Rihanna’s show-stopping vocal performances. On “James Joint,” she assures us that she’d “rather be/Smoking weed/Whenever we breathe/Every time you kiss me” in her most dulcet tones. Where previous LPs were built around clear peaks, here the songs fit together into a fluid landscape of seamless transitions – check the flow on the excellent mid-album run of after-hours joints from “Desperado” to “Woo” to “Needed Me.” Every song sounds like our collective fantasy of Rihanna: a carefree island girl lounging in a cloud of smoke, asserting a brand of independence that’s wholly her own. After more than a decade as a superstar of the singles chart, Rihanna has become an album artist.Īnti is first and foremost an experience built on vibes. The three full years since 2012’s Una pologetic – the longest break between releases in Rihanna’s career – turned out to be exactly what she needed to make a rich full-length statement. Now that we know it’s real, we can hear the singer’s eighth LP for what it is: a sprawling masterpiece of psychedelic soul that’s far more straightforward than its tangled rollout. For much of 2015, repeated delays and a lack of solid information started to make Rihanna’s Anti feel like pop’s mythical creature. ![]()
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