Rihanna Finally Drops ‘Anti’ And It’s Not The Album Everyone Was Expecting

Rihanna has cemented her status as a 21st-century superstar through the release of new album Anti which has notched up a million downloads in just 15 hours.

On Wednesday morning, Rihanna released “Work”, a single featuring Drake, and the internet couldn’t have been happier on hump day. In March, new music from Rihanna was also made available but it turned out that it wasn’t part of the album.

According to Billboard, Rihanna inked a deal with bosses at Tidal to exclusively release the record through their site.

The album was accidentally uploaded to Tidal’s servers earlier this evening, giving quick-fingered fans a chance to share the tracklist and full versions of every song. This new single features Drake and the track is from Rihanna’s upcoming album.

It’s peculiar then that Rihanna would write “FIRST SINGLE” when introducing the song. She followed the star-studded track with “Bitch Better Have My Money” and “American Oxygen”.

Tidal, which has struggled to match its competitors, is also owned by Madonna, Beyonce, Usher and other acts.

The release date of the album is yet to be confirmed. What’s more, fans did not even have to have TIDAL subscription to download.

Some music industry observers suspected that Rihanna did not want to compete with British ballad singer Adele, whose album 25 broke first-week sales records in November.

After all, the “Anti” world tour is set to start on February 26, with two nights at Barclays Center set for March 27 and 30. It does include the Drake collaboration “Work” that came out today (not her first Drake collab, of course) and that explains why she called it ANTI’s lead single earlier.