Rihanna’s last few albums have tended to follow a relatively similar format: a couple of bombastic, soaring singles destined straight for the top of the charts, a few slow, crooney ballads that will never quite match the raw power of ‘Unfaithful’, and some lame collaborations with whichever EDM giants her label can get their hands on. But in the three years following her last album, Rihanna seems to have thrown this format completely out of the window. Instead she gives us ANTIi, effectively an anti-pop album which feels more like a woozy drug-fuelled mix-tape than it does the latest hit from one of the world’s biggest pop stars. What’s nice about this is, for the first time, it feels like we’re meeting the real Rihanna, whose public image (weed-smoking, beef-instigating, bad-ass bitch) has often jarred with a lot of her pretty ordinary pop outputs. From the moment the creeping, tinny percussion of ‘Consideration’ hits, Rihanna pulls us into her world of drugs, darkness and heartbreak. The opener’s as solid as it gets, pairing Rihanna’s based out, Barbadian flow with SZA’s airy vocals, whilst ‘Kiss It Better’ keeps the tempo but adds sweeping guitar solos and a more traditional pop chorus to the mix. ‘Work’ is the closest thing on ANTI resembling a hit, which sees Rihanna literally slurring over a pseudo-dancehall beat – it’s a stunning single, although Drake’s lazy auto-tuned verse at the end drags it down a little.

Unfortunately, ANTI is an album which takes off with incredible speed but slams into a brick wall about halfway through. ‘Woo’ tries to be atmospheric but ends up playing like a bad remix of FKA Twigs’ ‘Figure 8’, whilst ‘Needed Me’ and ‘Yeah I Said It’ keep the moody production but don’t really go anywhere exciting. Tame Impala cover ‘Same Ol’ Mistake’ sounds great, Rihanna’s vocals weaving in and out of the psychedelic production with grace and elegance, but it’s so similar to the original that it’s very difficult to attribute much artistic value to it. The experiments with throaty, Winehouse-esque vocals towards the end of the album with ‘Love on the Brain’ and ‘Higher’ are interesting but neither of the songs are well-written enough to really fly. It’s intriguing to hear Rihanna being herself and not just a blank canvas for Roc Nation to decorate with whatever’s sellable, but only as long as she has something interesting to say. It begs the question of what has more validity: an entirely manufactured yet brilliant pop album such as her seminal Good Girl Gone Bad or the interesting yet inconsistent collection of songs we have here?

Max Roe