In a back room, video projections showed exactly how Nachum created the stunning artwork. Rih spills album details in the video above. So being misunderstood, I am not offended by the gesture, but honored. I live it and love it and despise it and I am entrapped in it. That thumps and bumps against the walls of my cranium. The world is pin drop sound compared to the boom I live loudly in my mind, so many hours of the day. I will comfortably breath in it, until I find the moment to be silent. It is the opposite of what others are afraid of.

That people just won't understand the depth of my message. What I choose to say is of so much substance Sometimes the top is the only place safe enough to look weak.I sometimes fear that I am misunderstood. The album ends with two more moments of radical vulnerability: “Higher,” a bleary retro-soul song in which she’s mulling her regrets at the end of a very long night, and “Close to You,” a sparse piano ballad that shows off her most unguarded singing. In “Work,” a lithe, dancehall-inspired duet with Drake, Rihanna’s vocal melts into love-drunk babbling the song shares a cool sensuality with “Hotline Bling,” which contrasts with Drake’s aggressive recent work in the same way that “Anti” does Rihanna’s. “Anti” is remarkably tender at points, as in “Kiss It Better,” a woozy synth-rock jam about a lover seeking reconciliation, and “Never Ending,” which sets a similar idea over an acoustic arrangement that borrows from Dido’s “Thank You,” of all things. She’s also pushing back against her established image, which over the last few years has toughened, thrillingly, into a kind of icon of imperturbability. Yet Rihanna isn’t merely flexing her hard-won control here. “I got to do things my own way,” she sings in “Consideration,” and no one could doubt her determination. Rihanna in rolled-up distressed jeans at Katsuya Restaurant in Hollywood in 2009. In each of these tracks you can hear the singer’s clear pleasure in exploring styles not necessarily keyed to chart domination. “Woo” rides a dark, needling groove produced in part by the rapper Travis Scott, whom Rihanna is reportedly dating. “Same Ol’ Mistakes” is a trippy remake of a tune by the Australian psych-rock band Tame Impala. “James Joint” has Rihanna describing her love of weed over shimmering, Stevie Wonder-style electric piano. “Consideration” is a scratchy hip-hop number featuring the underground R&B singer SZA of Kendrick Lamar’s Top Dawg crew.

Throughout “Anti” Rihanna turns away from the bright, propulsive sound of her best-known songs - “Umbrella,” “We Found Love,” “Diamonds” - and toward production that’s looser and more unpredictable. toward production that’s looser and more unpredictable.Ĭertainly, Rihanna is taking advantage of her position on this album, her most adventurous by far. Rihanna turns away from the bright, propulsive sound of her best-known songs.

Rihanna anti album cover