And yet Rihanna’s most impressive body of work begins and ends with her music. While it’s been more than two years since she released Anti, she continues to dominate the pop charts, and she set yet another benchmark this March as the first female artist ever to surpass two billion streams on Apple Music. With her next record—her ninth—Rihanna is moving the needle on her creative output all over again: She plans to make a reggae album. Though it’s too soon to name a full list of collaborators, one early influence may be Supa Dups, the Jamaican-born record producer who has worked with such dancehall greats as Beenie Man, Sean Paul, and Elephant Man. If Rihanna had to name her favorite reggae artist of all time, though, it would have to be Bob Marley. (Descriptions of the Bob shrine she once built in her home are all over the internet.) “I’m gonna sound like a real tourist when I tell you my top Bob songs,” she says, pausing to scroll through a playlist on her iPhone before rattling off many of his most beloved hits: “Three Little Birds,” “No Woman, No Cry,” and “Redemption Song,” a Marley classic she has covered on tour. It may surprise you to learn that of all the tunes in the reggae icon’s catalog, “Buffalo Soldier” is the one that resonates with Rihanna on a deeply personal level. The song’s theme of upheaval and displacement is a familiar refrain for the singer, who was whisked away from Barbados to New York within months of being discovered by record producer Evan Rogers at the tender age of sixteen. Her risk-taking instincts and taste for danger have often earned her comparisons to Madonna, though in fact the similarities between Bob Marley and Rihanna ring truer, even beyond the obvious island connection. Like Marley, Rihanna is possessed of an unstudied yet wholly electrifying sense of cool. Her ability to continually recalibrate the mood of a generation in the way she sounds, looks, and moves through the world has unwittingly positioned her, just as it did him, at the global axis of popular culture.

eek why does it sound like she barely started on the album.

bitch better have my album ready by the end of 2018 at the very LATEST.

I love her, but it seems she puts her music second these days. at least it's not 2015 when we got three singles then she spent half a year trolling us :')

eek why does it sound like she barely started on the album.

bitch better have my album ready by the end of 2018 at the very LATEST.

The fact that she's talking about the specific sound of her next album makes me think that it's almost finished actually
She did say the album was "coming" on IG the other day, plus we know that she's been working on it for more than a year now

Man Down is her best song and that's the tea so I'm kinda here for this, as said I doubt it would be the entire album it might just be an overarching theme.

Besides Work was dancehall so a few songs in that vein as well as some full on reggae.

According to current rumours and Twitter both R9 and R10 are coming this Q4

Would be good if there was a collaboration with The Weeknd on the album.

omg a dream would come true!! my 2 favs. Still FUMING he didn't end up supporting the Anti Tour.