Ironically, if the album has a narrative arc buried underneath the fuck-off, broad-strokes empowerment now so omnipresent on pop radio, it’s about disappointment: The ways in which the people you trust can still come up short in the end, and how catastrophically lonesome that can feel. The sentiment feels deliberately placed, meant as a way to read everything that follows. Her grainy, mesmerizing voice is paramount here, the sun in ANTI’s universe, the thing everything else orbits: 'I got to do things my own way, darling,' she announces over a stuttering, distorted beat in opener 'Consideration,' a prickly collaboration with the R&B singer SZA. It’s not crammed with bloodthirsty, dance-oriented jams and feels distinctly smaller, more inward-facing than her previous records, as if it were intended as a kind of spiritual stock-taking, a moment of reckoning for both Rihanna and her fans. ANTI is a rich and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its most idiosyncratic. Anyone hoping its delayed release might suggest something about its ambition, that the three-years-in-the-making ANTI might be Rihanna’s opus, a grand declaration of intent, is likely to be underwhelmed. Then, suddenly, the album appeared in full. Then, last Wednesday afternoon, a track listing appeared (that a gang of disembodied song titles still constitutes a noteworthy breach surely indicates something about our desperate times), followed by the announcement that ANTI would be streaming exclusively on Tidal for its first week of release (who cares)-two meager dribbles of intel that were quickly overshadowed, perhaps rightly, by Kanye West hollering about pants. There’d been rascally fake-outs, three singles (none of which made it onto the actual album), whole social media accounts teasing its release. The build-up, of course, was extraordinary. Still, ANTI-her very-long-awaited eighth LP-arrived tentatively, almost meekly. It is hard to imagine anyone inhabiting a pop career with more ease or aplomb. Hearing her deliver a line like 'Don’t act like you forgot/ I call the shot-shot-shots' (from 2015’s ' Bitch Better Have My Money') with a kind of preternatural calm-it’s hard to imagine anything ever feeling better than that.

Rihanna’s sureness regarding her presence in the world-in the work that she’s made, in the ways in which she has earned the right to palm a cocktail and chill on a beach-is bold and motivating, like Actual Confidence always is. Yet somehow, those hijinks don’t lessen her seriousness they merely amplify it.

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