Rihanna becomes the first female artist to have ten songs reach 1 billion streams on Spotify, despite not releasing an album since 2016.
Rihanna has become the first female artist to have ten songs reach 1 billion streams on Spotify, making her the only girl in the world to achieve such a milestone without releasing new music in years. The 35-year-old Grammy winner reacted to the news on social media on Friday.
“Bad Gal billi,” she wrote on Instagram and Twitter, referencing her status as the youngest self-made female billionaire in the United States. “With no new album,” added the singer, whose last album, Anti, was released in 2016. “Lemme talk my s—,” she concluded.
In March, Rihanna told Vogue about the pressure she feels to release new music since Anti, “my most brilliant” and “most cohesive album.”
“There’s this pressure that I put on myself that if it’s not better than that, then it is not even worth it,” she said. “It is toxic. It’s not the right way to look at music because music is an outlet and a space to create, and you can create whatever. It doesn’t have to even be on any scale. It just has to be something that feels good. It could just be a song that I like; it literally could be that simple.”
“So I realized that if I keep waiting until this feels right and perfect and better, maybe it’s going to keep taking forever, and maybe it’ll never come out, and no, I’m not down to that,” Rihanna continued. “So I want to play, and by play, I mean I have my ideas in my head, but I can’t say them out loud yet.”
“I want it to be this year,” she concluded. “It’d be ridiculous if it’s not.”
Her first song in nearly seven years, “Lift Me Up,” was released in October 2022 as a feature on the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack. The song served as a tribute to the late actor Chadwick Boseman. Its release left fans speculating if a new album from the Caribbean singer would be in the works.