Two Hands

BIG THIEF  Two Hands    7.5

Anyone hoping that ANTI might be Rihanna’s opus, some grand declaration of intent, is likely to be underwhelmed. ANTI is a fun and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its smallest and most idiosyncratic. If the album has a narrative arc, it’s about disappointment: the ways in which the people you trust can still come up short in the end, and how lonesome that can feel.

Part of Rihanna’s appeal is aspirational: survey the photographic evidence, and she seems to spend a pretty good chunk of her time wearing jewelry on yachts, smoking terrifically robust marijuana cigarettes, and making goofball faces at jokers trying to stealth-snap pics of her as she parties deep into the night.

Yet somehow, those hijinks don’t lessen her seriousness; they merely amplify it. 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. 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. It is hard to imagine anyone inhabiting a pop career with more ease or aplomb.

Still, ANTI—her very-long-awaited eighth LP—arrived tentatively, almost meekly. The build-up, of course, was extraordinary. There’d been rascally fake-outs, three singles (none of which made it onto the actual album), whole social media accounts teasing its release. 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.

Then, suddenly, the album appeared in full. 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. ANTI is a rich and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its most idiosyncratic. 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. 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. The sentiment feels deliberately placed, meant as a way to read everything that follows.

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. It’s also about self-isolation, and how being good at being on your own ("I can be a lone wolf," she sings on "Desperado," her vocals deep, crackly) can become its own kind of albatross, a cage that bars from the inside.

The dancehall and dub-indebted single "Work" hints at an intimacy in what is otherwise a fairly transactional Rihanna single: Drake is here, sounding weirdly buttoned-up and too articulate, like a grown man wandering onto the beach in a pair of ill-fitting jeans. The hook is Rihanna babbling about getting it done—"work-work-work-work-work-work"—her vocals devolving into something more instinctive than language, as if it gushed forth from some underground spring instead of her throat. But the words suggest that another Rihanna, a more wounded and wary version, is hovering nearby.

Do we need access to that girl? Maybe not—there’s plenty here that feels high-stakes and revealing. Rihanna talks more convincingly about sex than almost any other pop star, and some of ANTI’s most striking tracks are also its nastiest: "Love on the Brain" is a retro-leaning doo-wop jam with a crew of backing vocalists that takes an unexpected turn toward the dark: "It beats me black and blue, but it fucks me so good," Rihanna chants, her voice suddenly flinty. Her deployment of "it" feels deliberate, painting her partner as a disembodied force, less a person than a ghost she can’t escape.

"Yeah, I Said It," co-written and co-produced by Timbaland, is a crawling, steamy ode to two people slamming up against a wall (literally): "Yeah, I said it, boy, get up inside it/ I want you to homicide it," Rihanna purrs over a sparse, hazy beat. "Never Ending," which nicks a vocal melody from Dido’s "Thank You," is a gooey, vulnerable dirge that reiterates how Rihanna experiences love, how it helps her navigate and recognize her physical self, the way she feels its absence physically: "I knew your face once, but now it’s unclear," she sings. "And I can’t feel my body now."

But it’s "Higher," the record’s penultimate track—it really should be its coda—a two-minute imploration to a distant lover, asking him to just come over, already, that feels the most revelatory. The track was co-written by Bibi Bourelly, the 20-year-old electropop artist from Berlin who also wrote "Bitch Better Have My Money." "This whiskey got me feelin’ pretty, so pardon if I’m impolite," Rihanna sings, her voice raked, raspy, desperate over collapsing strings. Whatever had been holding her together until then—it broke. "I wanna go back to the old way," she admits. "But I’m drunk and still with a full ashtray, with a little bit too much to say." And then, as if it had never happened—as if she deleted the text, pulled the blankets up and went to sleep—the song ends, unresolved.