Rihanna reveals staggering number of unreleased songs she’s sitting on
Rihanna revealed she’s hanging onto 170 unreleased songs since her last album.
“If there are 10 products in a vault, then I have at least 17 vaults,” she said during a TikTok Live for Fenty Beauty on Wednesday — that adds up to 170 songs.
A$AP Rocky, the “Umbrella” singer’s longtime partner, previously divulged that she was “in the studio right now” during an August interview with Jason Lee, adding “Like, bro, she working. She cooking, no funny sh–t. Damn, I’mma get in trouble for this.”
The Grammy winner’s last album, “ANTI,” was released well over a decade ago, in January 2016.
Since then, her fanbase — known as the Navy — has been anticipating her next album, despite the release of her 2025 track “Friend of Mine” for the “Smurfs Movie.”
The mom of three, 38, has teased seemingly elusive new music a number of times over the years.
In 2018, she heavily hinted at a reggae-inspired or “reggae-infused” album she dubbed “R9,” telling Vogue at the time, “Reggae always feels right to me. It’s in my blood.”
She also addressed fan malcontent over the next album, telling the outlet, “I know I have some very unhappy fans who don’t understand the inside bits of how it works.”
Later that year, she tormented them with an Instagram Reel, captioning it, “update: me listening to R9 by myself and refusing to release it.”
But in 2020, she literally changed her tune, saying the album wouldn’t be confined to reggae, and explaining that she feels she has “no boundaries” when it comes to music.
“I’ve done everything — I’ve done all the hits, I’ve tried every genre — now I’m just, I’m wide open,” she told British Vogue at the time. “I can make anything that I want.”
By 2022, she told Vogue she was viewing her “next project completely differently,” and that same year, she shared a social media teaser for her song “Lift Me Up,” which dropped in October of that year.
A year later, in 2023, she confessed to British Vogue that though she wanted the album to drop that year, “Maybe it’ll never come out and no, I’m not down to that.”
She subsequently explained to Interview Magazine in 2024 that perhaps her “visual ideas” were “leading [her] to the songs” that she “needed” to make.
In her most recent update, the “Love the Way You Lie” singer told Harper’s Bazaar last year that new music won’t “be anything that anybody expects,” noting that it also won’t “be commercial or radio digestible.”
She added, “It’s going to be where my artistry deserves to be right now.”
Then again, fans have speculated a retirement from music — which catapulted her to stratospheric heights of fame — could be on the horizon.
“Music was the thing that got the attention, but God had other plans for me,” she told fans at a Fenty event in 2024.
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