From “ What’s My Name” to “ We Found Love” to “ Bitch Better Have My Money” - the banner single of the pre- ANTI period, which does not surface here - unlikely, too-simple central hooks end up being deadly effective after repeated listens. It’s often true of Rihanna songs that bits, often the chorus, feel like easy placeholders for more compelling ideas that were never realized.
The listener will spend some time trying to get her bearings - as in the “rooms” of the app, trying to find something to really grab onto. It feels both blasé and vaguely contrarian as a pop album - the logical musical equivalent of traipsing around in the uncanny, Samsung-endorsed Matrix dreamworld of her digital advertising campaign. The structures off of which Rihanna is building are pretty toned down and simple, made more potent by lyrical flourishes and moments of unexpected pointedness. This pendulum-swing between experimentalism and recycled pop tropes - polish and a bit of feralness - is all over ANTI-, the Barbadian singer’s first since 2012. Though it is, at its heart, a musically anonymous, nostalgic power ballad in the lineage of Whitney and Mariah, Rih’s vocal performance - which strains her voice at its most crucial moments to the point that it sounds truly painful - makes it something memorable. The self-conscious edginess that has distinguished her among her pop peers rears its head musically, rubbing up against and transforming a relatively nondescript song that might otherwise fade into the woodwork of the album. Even over the buzzing synthetic violins and phased-out drums, there’s a pop-bluesy affect to her vocalizations her that conjures the fleeting image of Elton John.
“This whiskey got me feelin’ pretty / So pardon if I’m impolite,” Rihanna croons at the beginning of “Higher,” the penultimate track on her eighth album, ANTI.
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