Anti

In the end, Anti’s tracks combine to create a picture of Rihanna at her most relatable and enthralling.

One of the most coherent and surprising big-ticket pop albums in years. [Apr 2016, p.79]

It's confusing, with flaky endings and mood swings, and an utterly compelling mix of not caring at all and desperately caring. [Apr 2016, p.87]

It might not have had a huge single to push those extra sales, but it feels real, it feels soulful, and it’s a representation of Rihanna that she will hopefully still be proud of 15 years on.

Rihanna delivers the best LP of her career. It's not chock full of huge singles; it takes risks and may well alienate the more casual element of her fanbase, but really they should have grown up with her over the last decade (otherwise newbies should stick to "Good Girl Gone Bad" and "Loud").

By the end of Anti, Rihanna may not arrive at any definitive conclusions about her art but she's allowed herself to be unguarded and anti-commercial, resulting in her most compelling record to date.

Her most adventurous by far.

This is an album that forces us to question the boxes we've placed Rihanna in all along.

Oh Rihanna, it was so worth the wait.... This album shows Rihanna hitting back at anyone who ever said her voice could only do certain things and showing them she can do anything she wants to. Such attitude; no apologies.

ANTI is perhaps her most complete and confident record to date.

Not every song is as outstanding as the next, but at points, Anti is incredibly satisfying and sufficiently distinct from her other efforts--very much worth the wait and the bizarre roll out.

ANTI is folk music played in a video-drome circularly projecting a 360° image of sprawling, semi-wilderness on fire as a compassionate, loving apocalypse. It’s a charged bleeding heart of sponsorship and exclusivity thrown into the throat of Yosemite. It’s a white horse galloping fiend-like across the continental divide, with a hoof-print-tire-tread that could pull the land apart.

ANTI is a rich and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its most idiosyncratic.

Anti takes risks and disregards convention in a way that only a true superstar like Rihanna could pull off.

What we have instead is a brooding, oddly sequenced, and scattered collection that defies easy categorization.

In many ways, ANTI is a step in the right direction for Rihanna, creatively.

After a three year album hiatus, Rih has rendered her most profoundly authentic and effortless act of rebellion yet – she’s making the music she wants to make without a singular fuck. Anti-pop, anti-album, anti-industry, anti-expectation, anti-perfection.

As a whole, Anti might not be as provocative of a statement as Rihanna hopes for it to be, but it’s still fascinating to see an artist in the midst of a metamorphosis.

Its muted mood and tempo may be initially disappointing for an artist who's been at the forefront of pop and, often, innovated it.... A closer listen, though, shows Rihanna harnessing the moody, intimate sounds for a novel purpose: to open up and let us peer into how complicated her adult life has become.

ANTI is Rihanna’s first aesthetically personal album, and throughout its disorderly roaming, it remains revelatory in a strict sense; it’s a musical step sideways but an artistic step up.

With its sense of unease, quiet, and longing, much of Anti is unlikely to grab ears on first listen or play well to Rihanna’s broadest base of fans. But it is an interesting artistic curveball in her heretofore hits-driven career.

It's an intriguing scrapbook of ideas and frequently enjoyable, but could use a banger or tow. [Apr 2016, p.112]

It’s not quite the revelatory departure we might have hoped for, and has the rich but unfocused feel of something worked on perhaps too long with obsessive fervour, but it’s also subtle and interesting; an intriguing soundtrack to an era of change.

This, for better or worse, is clearly the music Rihanna likes: leftfield, stoned and strange. It is Rihanna without hits. This strange album, released without warning over the internet for free, may well be a reflection of the fact that not even her own backers really expects this to be a commercial blockbuster. It is more an exercise in rebranding, transforming the hit girl into a serious artist.

It’s hard to work out from its contents whether in a few albums’ time its author will be back to churning out neon-hued anthems or embedded even deeper into the musical leftfield, because its contents are neither the kind of unqualified success that confidently maps out a future direction or the kind of unmitigated disaster that requires her to beat a hasty retreat.

The only real ‘surprise’ about Rihanna’s eighth album is just how challenging it is, not to listen to but to enjoy. Sonically, Anti is defiantly low key with very little to quicken the pulse.

The ultimate impression the album leaves isn't just that of an artist who failed to follow through on her vision, but who never bothered to conceive one in the first place.

Anti is a chaotic and scattershot album, not the product of a committed artistic vision, or even an appealingly freeform aesthetic, but rather an amalgam of approaches, tones, styles and moods.

There is nothing wrong with Rihanna’s default dead-eyed vixen delivery--it’s one of the seven wonders of the pop world. But ironically, she actually sings the hell out of this record. If only more of these songs could actually carry the weight of Rihanna’s bid for freedom--a bid that is, ultimately, half-baked.