Rihanna is back with her first new music in three years, although fans hoping for a single off the long-awaited R9 are going to be pretty let down.
Late Thursday, Canadian rapper PARTYNEXTDOOR dropped his new track, “BELIEVE IT,” which features Rihanna on backing vocals. While the collaboration makes sense — PARTYNEXTDOOR co-wrote “Work” and “Sex With Me,” which are on Rihanna’s 2016 album Anti — fans were upset to not have gotten a little more from the 32-year-old Barbadian singer, whose last releases were in 2017.
Rihanna quietly made her first non-sampled vocal appearance since 2017 on “BELIEVE IT,” a collaboration with Canadian rapper PARTYNEXTDOOR. The track appears on his freshly released album, PARTYMOBILE, which also features guest spots from Drake and Bad Bunny.
“BELIEVE IT,” a mid-tempo jam with a straightforward pop structure, doesn’t build on the exploratory sound of 2016’s critically-acclaimed and commercially unstoppable ANTI — but then again, with a record-breaking 200-plus weeks spent on Billboard‘s album charts and eight No. 1 dance club songs, Rihanna has set herself a high bar for herself.
There’s still no word yet on a release date for the now-mythical R9, her rumored and long-awaited reggae album that she previously promised to drop last year. If Rihanna is currently under self-imposed quarantine like many of the rest of us, hopefully she stops running out of excuses.
“[H]er army of devoted followers are disappointed RiRi only sings the track’s five-word chorus and backup,” noted the New York Post. Listen to the full song, which NPR calls “a mid-tempo jam with a straightforward pop structure,”