Many don’t realize queen Rihanna is only 23 years old, and has been teasing that her sixth album is going to hit store shelves before the calendar flips to 2012?To bring up a totally reasonable analogue, John Lennon had only released his first album at 23. At this rate, Rihanna just about due for a Britney Spears-esque career retrospective at next year’s VMAs and will be passing Neil Young’s album output before a reasonable mid-life crisis can even set in.
In any event, Rihanna has been letting her over seven million followers on Twitter that she has been in the studio working on the follow-up to 2010?s Loud, a fact originally reported on in Entertainment Fall Music Preview.
Rihanna promises that the new tracks, which fill her with excitement, will be out this fall, which essentially puts Loud to bed and will create a seamless transition from that album’s most recent single (the just-released “Cheers (Drink to That)”) and whatever new jam Rihanna be dropping from the new one.
With that in mind, let’s unpack Loud, an album that left the post-Chris Brown survivalist instincts of Rated R in the dust in favor of a more traditional pop collection. There were seven official singles from Loud, which is pretty jaw-dropping considering there are only 11 total tracks on the whole thing.
Of those singles, four of them (“Only Girl (In the World),” “What’s My Name?,” “S&M” and “Cheers (Drink to That)”) were big successes (the first three topped the Billboard Hot 100, while the latter currently sits at number 10). The other three (“Man Down,” “California King Bed” and the Nicki Minaj collaboration “Raining Men”) were pretty much DOA (despite the chart dominance of both of the women involved, “Raining Men” didn’t even chart on the Hot 100, which is a remarkable considering that even the minor songs from any random episode of Glee end up charting somewhere).
But on the whole, Loud should be considered a commercial success, especially considering the album as a whole moved a million and a half copies over the course of a year.
Aesthetically, Loud felt like a step back from the darkness of Rated R, but found Rihanna exploring more of the outer limits of her pop personality. Some of those experiments didn’t quite work ( Rihanna doesn’t have the chops to be a balladeer, which made the torch-song quality of “California King Bed” land with a thud), but most of the grooves really work.
Rihanna was able to integrate more of her island upbringing into “Man Down” (a criminally underrated track with a pretty mind-blowing video), and the breezy groove on “What’s My Name?” made Rihanna a perfect tag-team partner for lounge-hopper Drake. And even though it’s sort of ridiculous, there’s something undeniably infectious about “S&M.”
So where does Rihanna go from here? Will her forthcoming album pick an avenue of concentration, or will it be another a-little-of-everything affair? (The latter seems more likely, doesn’t it?)
But on the whole, Loud should be considered a commercial success, especially considering the album as a whole moved a million and a half copies over the course of a year.
Aesthetically, Loud felt like a step back from the darkness of Rated R, but found Rihanna exploring more of the outer limits of her pop personality. Some of those experiments didn’t quite work ( Rihanna doesn’t have the chops to be a balladeer, which made the torch-song quality of “California King Bed” land with a thud), but most of the grooves really work.
Rihanna was able to integrate more of her island upbringing into “Man Down” (a criminally underrated track with a pretty mind-blowing video), and the breezy groove on “What’s My Name?” made Rihanna a perfect tag-team partner for lounge-hopper Drake. And even though it’s sort of ridiculous, there’s something undeniably infectious about “S&M.”
So where does Rihanna go from here? Will her forthcoming album pick an avenue of concentration, or will it be another a-little-of-everything affair? (The latter seems more likely, doesn’t it?)
