Rihanna has shared an update on her long-awaited new album, revealing that she has “a lot of visual ideas” for the material.
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The singer spoke about the anticipated album in a newly shared discussion with Interview Magazine, which took place at the rehearsals for her first show in eight years.
On the night, Rihanna took to the stage at a pre-wedding ceremony in India to play her first full live show since 2016 – and was reportedly paid $6million (£4.7million) for the private concert.
During the discussion before the set, she was asked about what it was like to be back in a rehearsal space, and if she had “the vibe to do music again”.
“I have a lot of visual ideas. It’s weird. My brain is working backward right now,” she explained. “I usually have the music first, and the music leads me into all of these visual opportunities, and now I’m having all of these visuals, and I don’t have the songs for them yet, but maybe that’s the key, this time. Maybe the visual ideas are leading me to the songs that I need to make.”
When asked if she saw the project as somewhat of a “rebirth”, Rihanna responded: “Random ideas, quirky ideas, things that have nothing to do with me at all. I mean, I can’t tell you. The opps is watching.”
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Rihanna’s last full-length album came in the form of ‘Anti’ – her eighth studio record, which arrived at the beginning of 2016.
Speculation about a follow-up first got momentum in 2018, when she first began hinting at new material and promised fans in an Instagram comment that it would arrive in 2019. That year, she captioned a video of a dog dancing to House Of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’ with the message “Update: 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 upcoming project has been dubbed ‘R9’, and last October, Entertainment Tonight reported that she was planning her musical return, had signed a deal with Live Nation and was looking to go on a world tour from 2024-2025.
Similarly, in December, Rihanna took these rumours one step further by teasing on the red carpet that there may be new music and a world tour on the horizon.
“Well, we’re always gonna go back on tour. [But] I feel I want to do a tour when there’s new music. We already know what that’s gonna be, with the songs that I’ve performed on my last tour. That was a long time ago,” she told Entertainment Tonight.
“I feel like it’s only fair that my fans get what they’ve been waiting on, which is new music. After that, let’s just like, blow everything up.”
More recently, A$AP Rocky confirmed in February this year that his partner Rihanna is still “working on” her highly-anticipated ninth album.
Rihanna’s last release was the 2022 song ‘Lift Me Up’, the sombre lead single to the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack and a tribute to late actor Chadwick Boseman.