Rihanna has spoken for years about the status of her ninth album, most recently telling Entertainment Tonight that she was “starting over” in June. In the months since, the singer has made good progress—and is excited and “ready” to share her work, she tells Harper’s Bazaar in its March cover story.
She is “really optimistic” about the music, she said. “This feels right. It feels like it digs right into where I need to be, and I want this. This body needs to come out, and I’m ready to go there. This is becoming my new freedom, because when I’m in the studio, I know that my time away from my kids [RZA and Riot] is to blossom something that hasn’t been watered in eight years. I’ve been in the studio the whole eight years. But it didn’t hit me. I was searching for it. I went through phases of what I wanted to do. ‘This kind of album, not that album.’ 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. I feel like I’ve finally cracked it, girl!”
Rihanna shut down 2018 rumors that R9 would be a reggae album. “There’s no genre now,” she revealed. “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. It’s not matching my evolution. I can’t do this. I can’t stand by this. I can’t perform this for a year on tour.’ 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.”
Rihanna’s last album was Anti, released in 2016. She celebrated its ninth anniversary with an Instagram tribute on January 28.