Rihanna says she has at least 170 unreleased songs, and still no date for R9

Rihanna has given fans a number to chew on, and it is a big one. During a Fenty Beauty TikTok Shop livestream on 7 October 2026, she was asked how much unreleased music she is sitting on, and answered with the maths of her own beauty brand.

The Fenty maths

Her answer was built on the Gloss Bomb Vault, Fenty's limited gloss collection. If a vault holds ten products, she said, then she has at least 17 vaults of music. That works out to a floor of 170 songs.

It is a joke with arithmetic in it, not an inventory. She did not say 170 finished songs are mastered and ready, and she did not give a release date for anything. What she did confirm, in her own style, is that the archive is huge.

Where R9 stands

Fans have been waiting for her ninth studio album, widely nicknamed R9, since ANTI arrived in January 2016. That is more than ten years without a new Rihanna album, even as she headlined the Super Bowl halftime show in 2023, released "Lift Me Up" for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in 2022 and "Friend Of Mine" for the Smurfs soundtrack in 2025.

Nothing on this livestream changes the official position: there is no announced title, tracklist or release date for the next album. Talk of a studio return is not the same as a record being close.

Why the number matters

A vault that size suggests an artist who has kept recording through a decade of business building and one-off soundtrack songs, without rushing anything out. For a fan base that has spent ten years chasing rumours, a self-reported 170 is the most concrete thing Rihanna has said about the music in a long time, even if it is wrapped in lip gloss.

We will update this story if an album date or title is confirmed through her own channels.