Rihanna delivers one of the great Anti climaxes in pop music

Anti
★ ★

It’s over two years since Beyoncé’s fourth eponymous album set a precedent for contemporary pop records going beyond a few singles and filler, with the singer assembling an army of producers and contributors to knock it out of the park. It is now not enough for an A-list artist to release an album. It must be an event that encompasses pop culture pulse-pushing and marketing genius, as well visually compelling, and monopolise the charts and the radio. On Thursday, Rihanna’s latest album Anti didn’t explode into the popular conscience, it petered.

The release of Anti was preceded by a sloppy campaign. While not as big a promotional and marketing car crash as Madonna's disastrous Rebel Heart, the tedious teasing on the album's website failed to compel. When it comes to making album deals with phone companies, Jay-Z learned the hard way with Magna Carta Holy Grail, hooking up with Samsung to release the record first for fans with Samsung phone hardware. Anti was released through the streaming service Tidal (although anyone can download it), with Samsung footing the bill for free downloads, as part of a reported $25 million contract Rihanna has signed with the company to promote both their products and her upcoming tour.

But fans don’t care how an album is released. They just want to hear it. Who cares about a Samsung marketing exercise? No one, apart from Samsung. It’s especially hard to maintain exclusivity when the album was seemingly accidentally posted on Tidal on the eve of its release, downloaded and leaked. But who cares, right? The album’s here! A new Rihanna record! Press play. Oh.

Rihanna epitomises a singles artist, with 58 to her name. And Rihanna bangers are relentless. They take over. She's had 13 number ones in the US Billboard Hot 100, the same as Michael Jackson. Her songs have solidified her as one of the biggest hitters in the modern pop songbook, Umbrella, Disturbia, Rude Boy, 'Only Girl (in the World), What's My Name?, S&M, We Found Love, Diamonds, Stay, Pour It Up and Bitch Better Have My Money especially. And that's not to mention her collaborations on other singles, Run This Town, Love the Way You Lie, All of the Lights and The Monster, all of which have all given her hip-hop cred. Not that Rihanna needs your approval. The most refreshing thing about her is the apparent zero f***s she gives.

It’s this brashness combined with pop omnipresence that makes Rihanna such an exciting pop star. While Taylor Swift is assembling her squad, turning friendship into a competitive exercise dressed up as feminist wholesomeness, Rihanna is partying at carnival, metaphorically knocking the schoolbooks out of Swift’s arms in the high school hallway en route to rolling a spliff at the back of biology class. While Beyoncé is exerting her Queen B power, RiRi is running around Coachella or having a laugh with her pals on a yacht as the rumours about her and Beyoncé’s husband won’t go away. While Katy Perry is acting out her chameleon-like post-cartoon stage image, Rihanna’s murdering people in her music videos. While Miley Cyrus is getting blitzed with Flaming Lips and graffiting “SEX IS COOL” on the dressing room wall, Rihanna is adjusting her septum piercing and Instagramming her latest tattoo by Bang Bang. She’s just … cooler. Her impact on fashion exerts both street and popular power, with the trickle-down effect seen in every line outside every school and student disco.

Which begs the question: at a time when Rihanna can make the biggest impact and has apparently been working on this record longer than her others, why does Anti feel so undercooked? This is not the bombastic swagger we've come to expect from RiRi. Neither does it feel particularly intimate. There are neither commercial hits nor interesting personal explorations. There are neither radio-baiting by numbers tunes, nor avant-garde, innovative production techniques. There is neither an all-star supporting guest list featuring on tracks, nor an asserting of her unique personality and identity.

To put how prolific a pop artist Rihanna is in context, Madonna released her debut album aged 25. When Rihanna was 25, she was seven albums in. Between her debut in 2005 and Unapologetic in 2012, Rihanna has only gone without an annual album once, with 2008 being a fallow year. Fast-forward to 2016, the longest wait Rihanna's Navy has had to endure before she dropped a record, and in the run up to Anti, there were three promising tracks, American Oxygen, FourFiveSeconds  and the brilliant Bitch Better Have My Money. None make the cut here.

Relentlessly downtempo, even her Barbadian drawl sounds disinterested on the opening track Consideration Feat. SZA. "I'd rather be smoking weed," the familiar James Joint opens, an intermission track that feels old, and it is, first teased back in April of last year. Another intermission, Higher, showcases a whiskey-drenched vocal that is straight up abrasive and out of her range, to the point that you can almost picture Pink grimacing side stage. Work, the lead single featuring Drake phoning it in from his hotline bling, falls flat. Love On The Brain is everything Rihanna isn't, a predictable moony old-school melody, that maybe an artist with a fuller voice could slay, but it's also a tune so middle of the road that even Adele might question its inclusion. By the time the squelchy sluggishness of Same Ol' Mistakes comes around, the pace and jaded nature of the album is veering from tedious to irritating. It's not like Rihanna doesn't do ballads well. Stay is one of her best tunes. Take A Bow is beautiful. And perhaps the song the comes close to those here is the final track Close To You.

Needed Me, which reaches for energy and bolshiness, is the album highlight. But crucially, and rather critically actually, in an era where pop song lyrics are transformed into memes within seconds, Anti contains none of that meme-relevant pop culture scaffolding that in this day and age is really necessary to secure the foundations of an album release from a pop star of Rihanna's stature and bankability.

On the plus side, because Rihanna’s albums have always really been larger placeholders to merely contain the big hit singles, there is more to explore here, even if it’s purely out of confused curiosity. Rihanna does display a breathier vocal dexterity, and songs are revealing if not exactly growers.

Perhaps Rihanna set out to make a personal art project, but that doesn’t chime with a campaign that at least appeared to indicate she was adjusting her posture for yet another home run. What the world wants from Rihanna, essentially smash hits delivered with a knowing middle finger, has been replaced here by a record that is both strangely coy and worryingly half-hearted.

[ Download the full album here ]