Rihanna has put a number on her unreleased catalog.
The 38-year-old singer and Fenty Beauty founder told fans during a TikTok Live for her cosmetics brand on Wednesday that she is sitting on roughly 170 unreleased songs. “If there are 10 products in a vault, then I have at least 17 vaults,” she said on the stream, doing the math out loud for viewers.
The disclosure lands nearly a decade after her last full-length album, “ANTI,” which dropped in January 2016. Since then, the Grammy winner has dropped only scattered tracks — most recently “Friend of Mine” for the 2025 “Smurfs Movie” soundtrack, and “Lift Me Up” in October 2022 for the “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” score.
A$AP Rocky, her longtime partner, had already tipped fans that she was active in the studio. During an August interview with Jason Lee, he said, “Like, bro, she working. She cooking, no funny sh–t. Damn, I’mma get in trouble for this,” He added that she was “in the studio right now.”
The Navy — her devoted fanbase — has tracked years of shifting signals about what was once dubbed “R9.” Back in 2018, she told Vogue that a reggae-inspired project felt inevitable. “Reggae always feels right to me. It’s in my blood,” she said at the time.
She also acknowledged fan frustration during that same Vogue conversation. “I know I have some very unhappy fans who don’t understand the inside bits of how it works,” she told the outlet.
Later that year, she posted an Instagram Reel showing herself listening to the unreleased music with a pointed caption: “update: me listening to R9 by myself and refusing to release it.”
By 2020, she had moved away from the reggae concept entirely. “I’ve done everything — I’ve done all the hits, I’ve tried every genre — now I’m just, I’m wide open,” she told British Vogue. “I can make anything that I want,” She added that she felt she had “no boundaries” when it came to music.
In 2022, she told Vogue she was viewing her “next project completely differently.” A year later, she confessed to British Vogue that her hoped-for 2023 timeline had collapsed. “Maybe it’ll never come out and no, I’m not down to that,” she said.
She offered a different framework in a 2024 Interview Magazine conversation, suggesting her creative process had become visually driven. Perhaps her “visual ideas” were “leading [her] to the songs” that she “needed” to make, she explained.
Her most recent substantive preview came in a Harper’s Bazaar interview last year. The music won’t “be anything that anybody expects,” she said. She added that it also won’t “be commercial or radio digestible.”
“It’s going to be where my artistry deserves to be right now,” she continued.
The singer, now a mother of three, has also hinted that her relationship with music may be evolving beyond traditional album cycles. At a Fenty event in 2024, she told attendees, “Music was the thing that got the attention, but God had other plans for me.”
Whether any of the 170 vaulted songs will see release remains unconfirmed. The singer has not announced a title, date, or format for a forthcoming project.