Rihanna Appears to Be Working on a New Album
Rihanna, the singer, is back. The multi-hyphenate seems to have grown weary of singlehandedly disrupting entire industries according to her whims, and is now hard at work creating some impending bops. The news comes courtesy of her very own Instagram Stories, where she posted one picture, one video, and one Boomerang showing her in front of the mic. It looks like she isn’t holding back, either: In the posts, she’s traded in her Met Gala-destroying looks for a T-shirt and white-rimmed sunglasses. She also captioned the Boomerang, “Vamp: when breakfast becomes dinner.” She remained otherwise wordless, supposing correctly that the visuals alone would cause the Internet to implode.
It’s unclear whether Rihanna has returned to the studio for a mere late-summer hit or a full album, but she previously gave fans a sneak peek at her musical projects in the works. For her June cover of British Vogue, she revealed that she plans to make a reggae album, with a possible collaborator in record producer Supa Dups. Then, in July, Rolling Stone reported, based on conversations with multiple unnamed sources, that she apparently has two albums on the cutting board: One “devoted to exploring [her] Caribbean roots,” and another that’s “pop-oriented.” Rolling Stone also reported that two unnamed sources have “confirmed” Supa Dups’s involvement, and that Rihanna has gotten a “large number of demos” from top dancehall and reggae producers and singers, including, reportedly, the duo R. City, Stephen “Di Genius” McGregor, Linton “TJ Records” White, Ricky Blaze, Tyshane “Beam” Thompson, Kranium, and Chronixx.
“[Rihanna’s team] have, no lie, 500 records for this project [from] different producers and writers,” one anonymous dancehall producer told Rolling Stone. “They’re only choosing 10 records. They’ve been having writing camps and trying to keep them quiet for almost a year and a half now. I’ve been flying to Miami, flying to L.A., cutting records nonstop for this project.”
“Every artist, every producer, every songwriter in Jamaica or of Jamaican descent has been working on [Rihanna’s album] and has little snippets of publishing or production credits on it,” another anonymous source added.
