A$AP Rocky has offered Rihanna fans a beacon of hope that the singer’s extended hiatus from music might be coming to an end.
On Saturday (February 17), a Rihanna fan page on X (formerly Twitter) shared a video that sees Rocky posing for a selfie with a fan in Paris. Towards the end, someone is heard asking him to tell his longtime partner that fans are ready for a new album, to which he replies, “She’s working on it.”
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If she does have a new album on the way, it would be the singer’s first full length release since her record-breaking, critically lauded 2016 project Anti, which was certified six-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) last June.
As of January, Anti now holds the distinction of being the first album by a Black female artist to spend 400 weeks (over seven years) on the Billboard 200 albums chart and the fourth longest charting album by a woman in the chart’s history.
In October, The Daily Mirror reported that the Fenty Beauty mogul was planning to return to music with the release of two new albums and a sprawling world tour slated to take place in 2024 and 2025.
The British tabloid reported that the mother of two recently signed a deal with Live Nation worth a reported £32M [almost $38.9M].
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“Rihanna is quietly planning a comeback tour after signing with Live Nation,” the outlet wrote, citing an insider. “The deal was created to facilitate a world tour and her creative team is quietly at work in Los Angeles putting it all together as she raises her family.
“She’ll press play on the live show once she’s ready to go back to work and has two albums’ worth of material to release once she’s back.”
However, just two days after the report surfaced, a “high-level source” debunked the rumors, telling Billboard the claims were “bogus,” and that “no tour has been confirmed for Rihanna.”
Ahead of her Apple Music Halftime Show performance at Super Bowl LVII last year, Rihanna revealed that she had been working on new music that will be unlike anything her fans are used to.
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The singer offered some insight into her upcoming releases during an Apple Music press conference ahead of the Big Game, sharing that her main priority with music at the time was “to have fun.”
“Musically, I’m feeling open,” Rihanna said. “I’m feeling open to exploring, discovering, creating, things that are new, things that are different, things that are off, weird, might not ever make sense to my fans, you know, the people that know the music that I put out. I just want to play. I want to have fun. I want to have fun with music.”
