Rihanna is starting over with her new album—no, really, she is

Rihanna is very, very aware of how much her fans want new music from her, so she had to know what she was going to incite a reaction when she stepped out in New York this week in a shirt that read, “I’m Retired.” Some observers took that to mean that the singer, who has become an extremely successful entrepreneur in recent years, was done with music. “No one read the other line!” she pointed out to Entertainment Tonight at her Fenty Hair product launch. “It was something like, ‘This is as dressed up as I get.’ … People got triggered with that retired word. They were like, ‘We’re never getting an album now.’” She added: “Clearly, I’m here, clocked in!”

And guess what, she went to the launch dressed up too, so you really can’t take a T-shirt at face value. But can we take Rihanna’s own statements about her album at face value anymore? “I think that music, for me, is a new discovery,” she told ET. “I’m rediscovering things. I have been working on the album for so long that I kinda put all that stuff aside and now I’m prepared to go back in the studio. Now I’m prepared. So I’m gonna start. Give me a second.”

The Grammy winner conceded that she is, in a sense, “starting over,” but “I don’t want to neglect the songs that I have. So I want to actually go back and listen to stuff with new ears, with my new perspective and then see what applies and what I’m still in love with.”

Basically, the album is both in the works and she also hasn’t really started working on it yet—what else is new? As long as she keeps feeding us these tidbits, the album will always be “in the works.” It’s Schrödinger’s Rihanna album. Last year, she said it would be “ridiculous” if she didn’t release an album in 2023, and then she didn’t release an album in 2023. (Rihanna has two small children, we get it.) She told British Vogue that she does put a lot of pressure on her new work, because “if it’s not better than [her last album, 2016’s Anti] then it is not even worth it.” But she admitted that’s a “toxic” approach: “It’s not the right way to look at music because music is an outlet and a space to create, and you can create whatever. It doesn’t have to even be on any scale. It just has to be something that feels good. It could just be a song that I like. It literally could be that simple.” Stans everywhere are surely hoping it gets that simple sometime soon.