Rihanna: Lift Me Up review – good girl gone drab?

I remember, vividly, waiting up one night in early 2016 to listen to Work, the first single from Rihanna’s eighth album, Anti. I was expecting some kind of supreme banger – a hit of equivalent euphoria to songs like We Found Love or Only Girl in the World. When I heard the song, I couldn’t help but feel that it was a little soft – a sad, surprisingly elliptical return. I filed it away under “sub-par Rihanna songs” only for it to work its way into my heart over the next few months; now it’s one of my favourite pop songs ever and a clear precedent for a wave of pop stars intent on singing about the quotidian drudgery of celebrity. (It also contains one of the most perfect pop lyrics – “Nobody text me in a crisis.”)

Rihanna’s first new track in six years, Lift Me Up, feels similarly limp on arrival – although perhaps with less chance of escaping from the also-rans pile. Written and recorded for the soundtrack to the forthcoming Black Panther sequel, it’s hardly the klaxon for a radical new era of Rihanna and is likely unrelated to the supposedly reggae-influenced ninth album that fans are breathlessly anticipating. Instead it’s a soft, swaying ballad built around a lovely arpeggiating harp and serene strings courtesy of Ludwig Göransson (who composed the Black Panther score).

The track’s lyrics (“Lift me up / Hold me down / Keep me safe / Safe and sound”) are light and frankly anonymous, a far cry from the brilliant, world-weary and starkly emotional lyrics of Anti. It feels like a money talks kind of song: it’s telling that the only two things luring Rihanna away from fashion and cosmetics and back into music in the coming months are the Super Bowl half-time show and a Marvel film sure to be a mega-hit. (There are indications that the industry, too, is holding out its hype for the “real” Rihanna return – Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist features the R&B singer SZA on its cover today, rather than Rihanna: basically an acknowledgment that this isn’t the “true” comeback single.)

The most notable feature of Lift Me Up is its writing credits: it was co-written by rising Nigerian alté star Tems, and you can hear her presence in the graceful and – for a Rihanna song – unusually ornamental verse melody. Still, there is little of the heft and power of Tems songs such as Free Mind or Damages in this track – just breezy harp, swelling strings and, faint in the background, the sound of a bunch of Marvel executives rubbing their hands together.