The loud hype that preceded Rihanna’s moderately quiet new music presents a lesson within the energy of expectations—particularly expectations defied. At age 16, in 2005, the Barbados native Robyn Rihanna Fenty signed a report deal and launched into one in every of hottest streaks in hitmaking historical past. Over seven years, she launched seven albums, every brimming with an beautiful pressure of pop that mirrored month-to-month traits and confirmed the would possibly of the major-label music machine—and but boasted, because of the star herself, an intoxicating sense of individuality and angle. The world, it appeared, had found a brand new, dependable useful resource: Rihanna bops.
But after 2012’s Unapologetic, she slowed her tempo and left her unique label. Her subsequent album, Anti, in 2016, was an unruly, stoner-pop artwork piece that made an announcement. After serving as a dependable provider of fare for the plenty, Rihanna would now be engaged on her personal phrases. Then, as she all however went silent musically for six years—throughout which era she constructed a vogue firm, had a child, and taunted followers who incessantly requested her when the following album would arrive—she appeared to ship one other message. Maybe, simply possibly, she was carried out enjoying the pop sport for good.
That sport, in any case, is a grueling one; simply take heed to the spate of current albums by Billie Eilish, Drake, and Taylor Swift complaining about fame. The identical armies of devoted listeners that prop up idols also can come to really feel like burdens, and scoring one smash after one other will not be the easy feat that Rihanna’s early run of success made it appear. So she’s been taking her time, for her personal sake. “It’s been so structured before,” she informed the Associated Press in 2020 in regards to the standing of her music profession. “You do the pop, you do this genre, you do that, you do radio … But now it’s What makes me happy? I just want to have fun.”
Fun will not be the primary phrase one would use to explain “Lift Me Up,” the only she launched at present—her first new solo music since early 2016. Gorgeous and heartbreaking are extra prefer it. A beats-free ballad off the soundtrack for the forthcoming film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, “Lift Me Up” would possibly seem to be the kind of legacy-burnishing monitor individuals count on a semi-retired singer to toss out sometimes. The music’s writers—Rihanna, the Nigerian R&B sensation Tems, the director Ryan Coogler, and the producer Ludwig Göransson—have made a powerful bid towards anybody leaving the movie show with out tearing up. But actually, two issues are thrilling in regards to the monitor. One is the sound of Rihanna’s voice. The different is the ambition it alerts.
As Jayson Greene argued in a 2017 Pitchfork essay, Rihanna could be essentially the most influential pop vocalist of our period. Though hardly ever applauded as a powerhouse expertise in her early days (a few of her performances on Anti began to vary that), her timbre and inflections are fully her personal—regardless of different singers on the radio always imitating them. “Lift Me Up” is constructed round her vocals and reasserts her possession of her now-ubiquitous sound. She opens with dewy hums after which busts into stately, sustained notes that crest with the sluggish great thing about dawn. At sure occasions, she sounds commanding, like a priest giving a sermon in music. At others, she is delicate and breathy, a supplicant making a determined prayer.
For her to finish her musical hiatus with a sluggish burner moderately than a bit of dance-pop would possibly seem to be an try and torment followers. “Lift Me Up” could possibly be, nevertheless, step one in a plan that may in the end please them. For her to hitch her comeback music to a extremely anticipated Disney/Marvel film—a blockbuster celebrating the worldwide Black diaspora, no much less—alerts that she hasn’t given up on claiming the highlight. The strictures of a movie-soundtrack gig additionally give her cowl to reintroduce audiences to her voice and expertise with out the necessity to engineer a nightclub-dominating hit.
Such a success should be coming. Rihanna is slated to play the Super Bowl halftime present subsequent 12 months, and she or he has one other music on the Wakanda Forever soundtrack. For now, nevertheless, “Lift Me Up” does its job nicely. Commemorating the lifetime of the late Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, the monitor has a soothing simplicity, with strings and guitars that rise and fall within the method of meditative respiration. Listeners will likely be working themselves into ever larger ranges of agitation as Rihanna plots her return. If they wish to settle down, they will simply take heed to this music.