Critic-at-Large

Anti, Revisited

Ten years later, Rihanna’s finest hour begins to sound more and more like her final

It’s been ten years without new Rihanna music. To people my age, that might not feel like such a statement. We spent our teenage years seeing the star as everything but a studio musician: as a makeup tycoon, a lingerie designer, an actress, a Super Bowl Halftime Show, a mother, a billionaire, a Jonathan Anderson fan. So it’s hard for me to imagine or to reconstruct that moment in early 2016 when her eighth studio album, Anti, finally dropped—and just what a swerve it must have seemed like. 

There was some discourse at the time, in outlets such as Pitchfork and The Guardian, regarding Anti’s lack of commercial appeal or radio-friendliness. Well, after ten years of hearing nonstop songs like “Work” in its straightjacketed dancehall glory and “Kiss It Better” in its schmaltzy R’n’B groove, they’re sorely mistaken. What Alexis Petridis of The Guardian got right, though, was the sense of confusion manifested by the album’s tapestry of genres and experiments. It had been a while since Rihanna was serving kidz-bop Mariah Carey realness on tracks like 2005’s “Now I Know”—she’d found her style as early as 2007, really. But Anti pushes it: there’s a highly-quantised, lean, polished finish on all of these songs, no matter how acoustically the genres that inspired them originated. In fan-favourite “Desperado”, the singer’s sitting in an “old Monte Carlo”, wondering, “There ain’t nothing here for me anymore”; that low-pass filter on the instrumental bridge only deepens the divide between old and new. 

Similarly, the straightforward soul track “Love on the Brain”, in a smooth 12/8, is almost a pastiche. But then there are those metaphors about money and violence, about a love that “beats [you] black and blue”; and that sudden synth padding that comes in on the pre-chorus; and the grit and nastiness of its author’s voice—and suddenly we’re in the future again. Its effect is only amplified by the following “Higher”, a coda in the same metre and tempo but now replete with a ghosted violin. It’s a glitched-out, too-drunk, last-ditch phone call to a man who’s gone or can’t stay, and it draws out the vulnerability that’s been lurking behind the more confident, typically Rihanna-ish tracks that precede it. (I can’t help but think that “Needed Me”, for instance, even though it projects arrogance, is occasioned by feeling misunderstood: “But baby, don’t get it twisted”.) We find resolution in the closer, “Close to You”, in which Rihanna shows herself as a protector against cruelty rather than an arbiter of or victim to it. Grant that maybe this guy’s not malicious, just indecisive—most of ‘em are!—but is there a quality less Rihanna than indecisiveness? It’s cast as a piano ballad, à la the Nicki Minaj deep cut “Grand Piano”, and all it can “hope” for this love is “that [its] message goes”: towards its recipient, yes, but away from its sender, too. 

I don’t mean here to flatten out the richness and diversity of the album’s styles and moods (it even includes a Tame Impala cover!) by suggesting it’s merely a breakup album. Its last three tracks are strong enough to draw the eye in that direction, but there’s too much material here to give the album a reading as simple as that. Anti is, in that sense, Rihanna’s most uneven album to date. But like Beyoncé (who also has a major 10-year anniversary coming up in 2026), Rihanna’s twin subjects on Anti are love and power. What happens when you organise your life, as we all have done or will do, around a force so volatile and changeable as sex? We listeners can only hope to feel as confounded in the face of that question as Anti does—in the meantime, we have these messy thirteen tracks to feel it out for us. 

1986, Revisited

Kate Camp’s new book looks back at her old diary

I knew Wellington poet Kate Camp for her 2025 release Makeshift Seasons, a poetry collection so subtle and stunning, so full of quiet observations and unspoken sadnesses, it possessed my reading for months—now, for almost a year—after my first encounter. I knew Camp’s work for her wit and lowkey musicality; as a poet who could roll around in cultural detritus at one moment—Superman, the Beach Boys, Homer—and turn out bars of verse at another: “I experience the ocean as a vertical plane / as I came down the road from the funeral / how it filled the space of the valley like a vessel / the dark-blue cup of it against the mid-blue sky”. 

The Kate Camp I didn’t know was the precocious teenager, thirteen-going-on-fourteen, who wrote her 1986 diary, entries from which largely compose her latest release, Leather and Chains: My 1986 Diary. The book originated at the Bad Diaries Salon, an annual literary event in which writers are invited to read from their own bad diaries, unedited. Camp’s performances here were, I’m told, a hoot—and there’s occasionally the sense that this book would work better in performance. But it works on its own terms thanks to the inclusion of commentary, after each diary entry, from today’s Kate, the kind of commentary reflective of what I love about her poems. There’s a sense of amazement at memory and what it fails to capture, and a self-aware sense of humour that doesn’t become noxious or self-deprecating. 

And, of course, there’s a bittersweet mix of sympathy and admiration for the girl of the diary—existentially lonely, posing as an adult—that Camp used to be. That attunement to life in all its weirdness and rarity is a Camp signature, made all the more potent in the two essays that bookend this volume. From the second one: “Every moment is a kind of forgetting: there’s always some level of detail, awareness, and reality that is just beyond your grasp.” This book is a perfect weekend read, presented in a gorgeous volume by our very own Te Herenga Waka University Press. Leather and Chains forever.