Rihanna’s ninth album has been teased yet again… but fans don’t believe it

Adam WhiteThu, August 6, 2026 at 8:23 AM UTC

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Rihanna at the 2026 Met Gala in May (Getty)

A new Rihanna album has been teased for what feels like the billionth time in the last decade.

The superstar hasn’t released a full body of work since 2016’s acclaimed Anti, and has spent much of the last 10 years doing everything but releasing music. Instead, she has largely focused on her cosmetics brand Fenty – to an extent that her fans have dubbed her more Avon lady than pop star.

Annoyingly, Rihanna has rarely stopped insisting during this time that she is going to imminently release more music. But outside of a handful of collaborations and soundtrack songs – among them tracks for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Smurfs – music has not materialised.

Now Rihanna’s partner has gotten in on the act. A$AP Rocky, with whom she has three children, claimed in an interview this week that his wife is in the recording studio again, and that new music is incoming.

“She’s in the studio right now,” A$AP told Jason Lee on his eponymous YouTube talk show. “Yeah, I said it. Sorry, babe.”

He continued: “Bro, she working. She cooking, no funny s***. Damn, I’m going to get in trouble for this. Her fans are going to kill me.”

It’s worth taking the rapper’s quotes with a pinch of salt, however, considering that R9 – as the mysterious album is known to fans – has been discussed with similar ambiguity since at least 2018.

That year, Rolling Stone reported that Rihanna was in the studio recording two albums at once, one pop and one reggae. Rihanna herself insisted that the record would be unveiled in 2019. But by the end of 2019, the album had not come out, despite Rihanna confirming her plans to release two bodies of work at once.

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“One was gonna be inspired by the music that I grew up listening to,” she told Vogue. “And one was gonna be the evolution of where I’m going next with music.”

Rihanna and her husband A$AP Rocky in 2022 (AFP/Getty)

In 2020, Rihanna told Vogue in a separate interview that she was “very aggressively” working on new music, adding: “I can’t say when I’m going to drop. There are no rules. There’s no format. There’s just good music, and if I feel it, I’m putting it out.” In 2021, she said she was “experimenting” in the studio.

Despite Rihanna headlining the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2023, she performed no new music, but did tell an interviewer that it would be “ridiculous” to not release new music that year. Ha! “I just want to have fun,” she said. “I just want to make music and make videos.”

In 2024, Rihanna said her new music has to be “amazing” to justify its delay, and in 2025 – amid ultimately baseless rumours that she was going to headline that year’s Glastonbury Festival – she confirmed that she’d been working on the album for eight years.

“I just cracked the code on what I really want to do for my next body of work,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “I am actually feeling really good about this. I know I kept saying this over the years … It’s not going to be anything that anybody expects. And it’s not going to be commercial or radio digestible.”

In fairness to Rihanna, she has also spent the last decade starting a family with A$AP Rocky, giving birth in 2022 to son RZA, to son Riot in 2023, and daughter Rocki in 2025.

Fans haven’t been convinced by the latest tease, with one tweeting: “People fall for this every time, it’s actually sad.” Another wrote: “After almost 10 years we are starving.”

Rihanna was one of the most prolific pop stars of the Noughties and 2010s, releasing eight studio albums in 10 years, housing blockbuster hits including “Umbrella”, “We Found Love”, “Rude Boy” and “Work”. In July she made a rare concert appearance by joining Jay-Z on stage at his Yankee Stadium residency in New York.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”