Craig Jenkins 
Rihanna’s Return to Music Is a Careful Balancing Act
Rihanna tends to zag when a zig is expected. It’s a reason to love her, but it’s also the main source of our intermittent frustrations. We want bops, and Robyn has a dozen other plans. Almost seven years after the release of ANTI, the most recent (and best) Rihanna studio album, the Barbadian pop star has become a billionaire and a mother to a son with model and rapper A$AP Rocky. Fenty Beauty, RiRi’s cosmetic line, launched in 2017, touting an impressively inclusive selection of foundations and concealers. Savage X Fenty, a lingerie line, followed in 2018. The next year saw the debut of the Fenty fashion house; the year after that, she started a skin-care brand, Fenty Skin. As Rihanna tends to family and beauty businesses, the tantalizing gains displayed on ANTI — the vocal excellence and the brash blend of R&B, trip-hop, rock, pop, and dancehall bangers — loom heavily in the imagination of the following she built between her 2005 debut album, Music of the Sun, and 2012’s Unapologetic, a span in which she released a new album every year but 2008. After that winter of “Work,” we heard six new projects from Drake, five from Taylor Swift, three from Beyoncé, and two from Frank Ocean, whose audience memed its way through the four-year wait for the follow-up to 2012’s channel ORANGE, setting the scene for the snark Rihanna sees whenever she drops a trailer for something that isn’t music. The mogul’s social-media mentions have been a smokestack since at least 2018. Waiting on Rihanna taught you not to wait on Rihanna.
Well, that was the story last month. This month, we found out that RiRi will be the talent at the next Super Bowl halftime show and that she has two songs on the Wakanda Forever soundtrack. (Trade whispers suggest a tour will follow next year. Time will tell.) On Friday, she released “Lift Me Up,” her first solo single since 2016’s “Love on the Brain.” The new song taps into the painful circumstances of the upcoming film: Chadwick Boseman, the brilliant actor who embodied Marvel’s warrior-king T’Challa in the 2018 blockbuster Black Panther, died in 2020 following a private battle with cancer, and the role was not recast. The sequel has got to contend with it. “Lift Me Up” does so gracefully. More like a prayer or a lullaby than a proper comeback single, the new Rihanna song seeks solace from calamity in the refrain it returns to every few lines: “Keep me safe, safe and sound.” For listeners who’ve been sweating over half a decade for a taste of Rihanna’s next direction, this ain’t it. “Lift Me Up” is a careful balancing act, a taste of a voice we missed and a tribute to another we lost too soon. The arrangement is airy, little more than a lot of lightly plucked mandolins, maudlin strings, and barely audible piano notes, a pivot from the hip-hop jams composer Ludwig Göransson and Kendrick Lamar compiled for the first Black Panther soundtrack. Rihanna sounds incredible, unfurling ever more impressive vocal runs as the song’s core refrain repeats. (That repetition is off-putting but useful. Intensity snowballs as backing vocals from Tems thread around Rihanna’s like a madrigal or, more to the point of this story about a fictitious East African technocracy, like a wistful national anthem.)
“Lift Me Up” isn’t giving you “All the Stars.” This couldn’t be that. Hope is in shorter supply. Everyone has felt the sting of loss, the nausea an awful surprise engenders. The video for “Lift Me Up” seems to subtly acknowledge that reality. Rihanna sings passionately to the setting sun while scenes from the film cut in, depicting Wakandans in moments of still sadness. On the surface, it’s mostly a teaser, your textbook popcorn-movie-trailer scenario, this slow, somber, emotive number telling you in threeish minutes that an upcoming feature film plans to wreck you. It’s also tapping into Forever’s unique circumstance: The Wakandans pine for T’Challa as we remember Boseman. There’s a chance for the movie to force a vital dialogue about grief that you hope the filmmakers didn’t take for granted. Maybe we hope the other RiRi song on the Wakanda Forever soundtrack serves us different energy, something cocky we can quote in text messages to exes (you know, the usual). For now, it’s just great having that triumphant voice back.
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