Rihanna's Long-Awaited Music Comeback Has Fans Melting Down

Er, guys, could the wait finally be over? It seems like Rihanna may finally be gearing up to us fans with new music after an agonizing wait. As pretty much any music fan will know, Rihanna's legions of fans have been desperate for new music from the star for years now, regularly spamming her social media accounts asking for a new album. Rihanna seemed to love teasing us too, taking to Instagram several times to troll us back over the much-anticipated music drop. In December 2019, she posted a hilarious video of a dog seemingly headbanging to music alongside the caption, "update: me listening to R9 by myself and refusing to release it." Then, in May 2020, she hit back at a fan who commented on one of her posts asking "Where's the album?" by responding, "I lost it" with a shrugging emoji, per BuzzFeed News.

She's dropped a few little tidbits since then, though, including in April 2022 when she told Vogue that she considered "Anti" the best album she's ever done, before adding of her new stuff, "I'm looking at my next project completely differently from the way I had wanted to put it out before. I think this way suits me better, a lot better." She then added, "It's authentic. It'll be fun for me, and it takes a lot of the pressure off."

But when will we actually get to hear this new music? Well, we may now finally have a date.

Rihanna's much anticipated return to music appeared to be teased by none other than Marvel Studios on Twitter October 25, when they tweeted a short video showing the logo for the second "Black Panther" movie, "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever." That then made way for an R logo (R for Rihanna, of course) alongside the date October 28. Plenty of fans took that to mean Rihanna is involved with the soundtrack after Hits Daily Double teased a few days earlier that RiRi had apparently recorded two songs for the movie. 

But while it's not quite the album release info fans have been clambering for, there's no doubt the reveal still sent them into meltdown. "Ok guys we need to put ourselves to reallly WORK WORK WORK bc RiRi is coming back this Friday and WE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR HER COMEBACK," one person tweeted, while another wrote, "riri is coming back y'all, the world is healing."

But while we still await more news of a full album, dropping new music makes a whole lot of sense for the "Diamonds" singer. Rihanna is confirmed to perform the halftime show at the 2023 Superbowl in February 2023, which suggests she could potentially finally release the album to coincide with the big show. The star dropped her last album, "Anti," all the way back in January 2016 and only made a brief return to music to feature on PARTYNEXTDOOR's "Believe It" in 2020.