Plaintive piano ballad 'Stay' is Rihanna inhabiting the post-Florence pop landscape, all chiaroscuro and natural voice. Oú est ma 'Umbrella'? On 'Pour It Up', she sounds alternately robotic and narcotized as she sings about how she's so rich she can pay for a $100 valet service and a night at the strip club and doesn't need friends.

Lead single 'Diamonds' mixes simile, cliché, and metaphor, serving as a potent reminder that someone thought this was the best the album had to offer. Rihanna's stature has been built on undeniable singles like 'We Found Love' and 'The Only Girl in the World', but tracks of this caliber are nowhere to be found. The Auto-Tune on Future's 'Loveeeeeee Song' feature calls to a mind a dog vomiting while Rihanna, in turn, sounds like she's been roused from a medicated slumber. The perfunctory Ibiza thump of 'Right Now' reflects badly on both her and producer David Guetta while 'Fresh Off the Runway' is capitalist braggadocio (nonsense grade) so static it borders on unmusical. She's frozen in a relationship with a bad person and tangled in a toxic situation that feels out of her control (SOUNDS FUN, RIRI!)- themes that are mirrored in Unapologetic's surplus of minor-key treacle. The rest of the album is a synth-pop slog that plays like the companion piece of Nan Goldin's 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency'. But ultimately, it's a bubbly pop tune that conjures up historical memory of women defending men who have hurt them. The song's upbeat tempo makes it a shoe-in single with cross-platform playlists in its sights she wants everyone to get the memo. MYOB is a tall order when your boyfriend once had to do an apology tour that included a stop on 'Larry King Live' with his mom. They pledge their eternal fealty, suck face in a Lexus, and let the world know that the love between them ain't nobody's business but theirs. Much has been made of the couple's duet, 'Nobody's Business', which is, unfortunately, one of Unapologetic's high points. This constructed image of power doesn't jibe with her purported rekindling with Chris Brown, who is most notable for Top 40 R&B diarrheatics, a decent MJ impression, and, infamously, beating the living shit out of Rihanna. We see the singer as self-possessed ('Good Girl Gone Bad'), a superstar isolated by her fame ('A Girl Like Me') who is full of sexual brio ('Rude Boy'). It was already difficult to separate Rihanna the pop icon, whom we think we know from her glamorous image and her songs, from the 'real' Rihanna, whom we think know from the bruised 'Robyn F.' of her 2009 LAPD police report.

Unapologetic rihanna full album