Instead Of A New Album, Rihanna Released This Video

The #RihannaNavy has been eagerly awaiting the release of Rihanna's eighth studio album since, well, pretty much the day after she dropped her last record in 2012. And while the regrettably early release of an incomplete album review on Mic.com yesterday led many to speculate that the singer would indeed be dropping her newest effort, ANTI, via Tidal on Black Friday, that turned out to simply not be the case. (What, world? Is the prospect of a touring Adele not enough of a Thanksgiving music miracle for you?) Instead, RiRi released a sultry new video teasing the album. Rihanna announced the new video, which shows her in a recording studio, on Twitter, telling fans that "there's more than meets the eye." The trailer is the second in a string of collaborations between the singer, Samsung, and theater company Punchdrunk. It shows her walking slowly, but purposefully, towards hauntingly lit recording equipment as music swells and she becomes seemingly taken over by the beat.

The cacophony of speculation concerning the imminent release of Rihanna's new album began after music writer Chris Riotta accidentally published a template review of the album to Mic.com that was subsequently aggregated to Yahoo. Full of a mix of generic details and notations like "[INSERT HERE]" place-holding for original text to come, the clearly incomplete article was quite obviously not ready for mass consumption. And while it has since been removed, screenshots and a little thing called Twitter still preserve it for posterity.

All of which leaves us still in the dark as to when Rihanna's new album will, in fact, be released. Her recently announced Anti World Tour, however, is confirmed for 2016, with tickets going on sale beginning December 3. And the writer who's early trigger finger was heard round the world? Well, he's proven himself to have one hell of a sense of humor.