Barbados’ biggest star has given fans waiting a decade for new music a striking clue: Rihanna says she is sitting on “at least 17 vaults” of unreleased songs.
Main image: DGBN graphic. Photo: U.S. Embassy Bridgetown / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
The singer and entrepreneur made the remark during a Fenty Beauty livestream on TikTok Shop, when her business partner Jennifer Rosales asked how much unreleased music she had stored away. Rihanna answered by comparing it to Fenty Beauty’s Gloss Bomb Vault, a ten-product collection, and said she had at least 17 such vaults.
Fans and outlets including HOT 97 and theGrio have done the maths and put the figure at 170 songs or more. Rihanna herself gave no exact number, and did not say whether the tracks are finished or whether any will appear on her next album.
Ten years since ANTI
Her last studio album, ANTI, was released in January 2016 and produced hits such as “Work”, “Needed Me” and “Love on the Brain”. She marked its tenth anniversary earlier this year with an Instagram montage.
Since then, new music has come in small doses: “Lift Me Up” for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in 2022 and “Friend of Mine” for the 2025 Smurfs film. She headlined the Super Bowl half-time show in 2023 without announcing an album.
The clues so far
Fans refer to the long-awaited ninth record as “R9”, although Rihanna has never confirmed that as a title. Hints have been building. In August, her partner A$AP Rocky said in an interview that she was “in the studio right now”. In February, she posted a muted studio clip of herself working at a mixing board.
In a 2025 interview with Harper’s Bazaar, she said she had settled on a musical direction that felt right after discarding earlier ideas, insisting she could not release “anything mediocre”. She also played down speculation that the new album would be a reggae record.
Why it matters
Rihanna is one of the Caribbean’s most influential cultural exports and a National Hero of Barbados, and her business empire, from Fenty Beauty to Savage X Fenty, has reshaped how global brands cater to Black consumers. Any sign of new music from her is a global event. For now, though, there is still no release date, no tracklist and no official album announcement.
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