Rihanna just measured her unreleased music in lip gloss. At a recent Fenty Beauty event, she was asked how many songs she’s sitting on, and she answered by pointing to the Gloss Bomb Vault on display.
“If there are 10 products [in the Gloss Bomb Vault] then I have at least 17 Vaults,” she said. Do the math and you land on roughly 170 songs, and that “at least” leaves plenty of room for the real number to be higher.
For a fanbase that has been refreshing timelines for R9 since 2016, that figure lands in two very different ways. On one hand, it’s proof she never stopped recording.
On the other, it means there’s a mountain of finished or half finished music sitting somewhere that nobody gets to hear.
Her last album, ANTI, arrived in 2016 and still holds up as one of the stranger, more personal records of her career. It also gave us “Work” with Drake, a dancehall flavored single that leaned straight into her Barbadian roots, a thread that runs all the way back to “Pon de Replay” in 2005.
That’s part of why the R9 conversation keeps circling reggae. Back in 2019, Rihanna told Vogue the next album would be a reggae project, though not a traditional one. Years later, fans are still wondering how much of that sound made it into those 17 vaults.
The gap between albums hasn’t been completely silent. She returned in 2022 with “Lift Me Up” for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, then headlined the Super Bowl LVII halftime show in February 2023, where she revealed she was pregnant on the biggest stage in American TV.
Most of her energy, though, has gone elsewhere. Fenty Beauty has grown into a full scale business that she’s deeply involved in, and she’s been raising a family with A$AP Rocky.
HotNewHipHop editor in chief Alexander Cole put it bluntly, writing that she “just hasn’t had the itch to drop a new album.”
Cole also noted that despite all the anticipation, there hasn’t been a single moment where an album felt genuinely close. His read is that fans are being asked to respect that decision, and that R9 shouldn’t be expected anytime soon.
Not everyone online sees it that calmly. A decade of teasing, cryptic comments and now a vault count tied to a beauty launch has some fans feeling like the music has become a punchline at product events. Others are just happy to hear her talk about songs at all.
The new number does settle one question. Rihanna is still making music, and a lot of it, by her own count.
What she plans to do with those 170 plus songs is the part nobody can answer yet. For now, the vault stays locked and the lip gloss is the only thing actually on shelves.
