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Rihanna’s big Super Bowl halftime performance is just around the corner, and as much as fans are anxiously awaiting her return to the stage, they’re somehow even more excited for her to drop a new album after a years-long hiatus from music.
During a Super Bowl LVII press conference on Thursday, the multi-hyphenate (music icon, billion-dollar businesswoman, etc.) spoke about where she’s at in the process of creating new music (something her fans have been hounding her for). “Musically, I’m feeling open,” she said at the event. “I’m feeling open to exploring, discovering, creating things that are new, things that are different, things that are off, weird, might never make sense to my fans. I just want to play, I want to have fun with music.”
RiRi also knows her fans are not-so-patiently waiting with bated breath for the album drop. The self-aware queen made a joke about her procrastination on new music. “Anti was the first time that I took my time making an album while not on tour,” she said. “That frustrated my fans a bit and now, look, I’m doing it to them again!”
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But the mogul has been quite busy as of late — from being a new mom to a burgeoning business owner and an upcoming performance of a lifetime — and she admitted to having a hard time balancing it all. “I’ve been so focused on the Super Bowl, I totally forgot my birthday is coming up. I totally forgot about Valentine’s Day,” she said. “[There’s] a lot of preparation, a lot of moving parts. And this week, this is the week that everyone is being tested. We’re just tightening up everything, everybody’s dialing in, everybody’s tuning up.”
But becoming a mother to her and boyfriend A$AP Rocky’s baby boy actually gave her the confidence to agree to stepping on one of the world’s largest stages. “When you become a mom, there’s something that just happens where you feel like you could take on the world, you could do anything,” she said. “The Super Bowl is one of the biggest stages in the world. So, as scary as that was — because I haven’t been onstage in seven years — there’s something exhilarating about the challenge of it all. And it’s important for me to do this this year. It’s important for representation, it’s important for my son to see that.”