Why "Anti" is Rihanna at Her Most Compelling

I revisit the Barbadian pop star's most personal release for its 10th anniversary.

This album review looks back at Rihanna’s most divisive full-length project for its 10th anniversary.

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Genre: Pop, R&B, Dancehall

Label: Westbury Road

Release Date: January 28, 2016

Vibe: 😵‍💫

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform

10 years after Anti, Rihanna seems far removed from her previous pop stardom. Despite an instantly meme-able Super Bowl halftime performance and a slot on one of the biggest soundtracks of 2022, it’s been a minute since she’s released anything you’d consider a proper follow-up to this record. It’s not like she’s needed to, either. Her wildly successful beauty and clothing brands have already made her a billionaire. She’s also been in full-on mom mode for much of the 2020s. But, with the benefit of hindsight, I wonder if Anti is a perfect coda of sorts, an exclamation point at the end of her extended run at the top of pop music’s A-list. It’s messy and contradictory and, intentionally, I think, hard to pin down. Instead of bearing her soul in a conventional R&B sense, she doubles down on mystique. She stops just short of clear emotional reveals, content to let the listener piece together the clues and allusions themselves. Somehow, it makes for a far more alluring experience that way.

Prior to Anti, Rihanna’s albums weren’t particularly well-received critically. Her previous full-length project, Unapologetic, was dragged for being rushed and, lyrically, generally lacking a ton of substance. The year before, Talk That Talk had fared slightly, though it was largely seen as a money-making vehicle for popular singles (including the Calvin Harris collab “We Found Love”) that were riding the final few waves of the EDM boom. That said, she’d never been more popular. The corporate machine knew it, too, which led to a protracted, expensive, and kind of confusing marketing build-up. She even released two more singles—"FourFiveSeconds” and “Bitch Better Have My Money”—in between albums, neither of which is on this tracklist. When the record finally dropped, her fans were perplexed. This wasn’t the Rihanna they knew. The one who churned out club bangers like no one’s business.

In an interview with Vogue in March 2016, it’s clear she was done catering to that specific sensibility:

“I didn’t really know what the sound of the album would be in the beginning. I knew what I wanted to feel. I didn’t quite know how I wanted to hear it, but I knew that I would know it when I felt it. And so I went through a host of songs—songs that I thought were big and songs that I thought were up-tempo and would make sense. In the end, I just gravitated toward the songs that were honest to where I’m at right now, and how I think. The things that I want to listen to. The things that I want to smoke to.”

With no recognizable lineage to her hits of years past, it was (and, I would argue, still is) more difficult for casual fans to connect with it initially. It may be ubiquitous in DJ sets and on nostalgia party playlists now, but at the time, “Work” wasn’t seen as a home run. In some circles, Rihanna was praised for returning to her Caribbean roots with a surefire dancehall track. Elsewhere, however, especially for those used to add the Top 40 sheen her songs normally came packaged in, it was seen as underwhelming. Too moody, too repetitive, and so on. Even the Drake feature, one in a long line of cameos on RiRi singles, comes across as looser and less precise than, say, “Too Good,” which dropped later the same year. Hearing it again for the first time in a long while, it’s an utterly transfixing song built on atmosphere, not attack. Its laid-back nature coaxes your defenses down instead of blowing through them with a blunt object.

What’s most fascinating in retrospect is how the deeper cuts tell you more about the meaning behind Anti than the singles do. The opener, “Consideration,” is one of the more introspective cuts she’s ever released. It takes stock of her career and accurately diagnoses one of the forces holding her back: the public’s unwillingness to let her go her own way. Though she shares a co-writing credit on the song, another artistic aspect not seen on her earlier records, it was originally a SZA joint, one she was reluctant to give up. The sentiment of detached longing and disappointment, emotions that would color much of Ctrl the following year, ooze out of every line. Where meaning becomes murkier is in lines like, “When I look outside my window/I can’t get no peace of mind.” Peace of mind from what exactly? Her detractors? Her own professional ambition, something she more or less admits was being held back by the weight of expectation? A hybrid of the two, perhaps?

Rihanna gets even more cold and clinical on Top 10 hit “Needed Me.” She unspools a female empowerment anthem over suitably woozy production from DJ Mustard with such a matter-of-fact delivery that she sounds almost bored by repeating this truth. “Didn’t they tell you that I was a savage?” she says at one point. “F*** ya white horse and ya carriage.” But then, on “Higher,” she lets her guard down and lets us know that maybe it’s not as clear-cut as she first makes it out to be. The first wisps of the track, one that Rihanna compared to a drunk voicemail, first surfaced nearly a year earlier, after an all-nighter of bleary soul-searching. Co-writer Bibi Bourelly later said that the final song was written in about 20 minutes, adding that the experience of pulling it together so quickly changed her entire approach to songwriting. Other highlights, from the equally uninhibited “Same Ol’ Mistakes” to the rock-infused “Kiss It Better,” are so unbothered with audience validation and so confident in their construction that you can’t help but get sucked in.

Overall, “Love on the Brain” remains the moment that lodges itself deepest in my chest. It’s Rihanna at her most exposed, pushing her voice until it frays, pulling this distinctive, aching kind of beauty out of a song built on an instantly recognizable sample. That pain feels earned, not stylized, like she’s daring herself to see how much she can throw at us before flinching. That tension has become one of the hallmarks of Anti. This album doesn’t sparkle or posture with huge dollops of surface gloss. It sits with discomfort, knowing that the star at its center no longer needs to be fueled by applause. It’s as assured a self-reflection as we’ve seen in pop this century, in part because it doesn’t hurtle toward an obvious resolution. There are no clear ends to these stories.

When Anti landed, pop was just starting to loosen its grip on polish and perfection, and Rihanna leaned into that opening headfirst. The result is a record that divests itself entirely of the need for external validation. It chases neither hits nor audience approval. Instead, it’s a portrait of an artist stepping back, taking stock, and deciding that saying less, and meaning all of it, was the boldest move she could make.

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What’s your favorite Rihanna track? Drop it in the comments.