Rihanna had never made a better record than Anti when the thing arrived with unexpected suddenness in January of 2016 and Rihanna hasn't bothered to make another record since so ... well ... perhaps Ms. Fenty knows she'd best leave the catalogue well enough alone until she comes up with something to top it. Which will be very, very hard indeed. 

Our in-house music writer, Ben, had very nice things to say about Anti in the Toronto Star when it first dropped so why mess with his assessment, either? Here's what appeared in Toronto's "newspaper of record" on Jan. 28, 2016: 

"Perhaps it really was a behind-the-scenes screw-up that got Rihanna’s Anti hastily released to the world for free after an unintentional leak via the streaming service Tidal on Wednesday evening, or perhaps not.

Either way, dropping Anti as a 'gift to my navy' — as RiRi did via an out-of-nowhere Twitter link shortly after it grew clear this leak would not be plugged — is probably the smartest way to market a cryptic and rather challenging record.

On one hand, Rihanna’s handlers at Roc Nation are spared the ignominy of watching this defiantly hit-free, three-years-in-the-making opus plummet from the charts when the public realizes there’s not a single 'Diamonds' or 'We Found Love' in the mix. On the other, normally pop-averse cynics might be more inclined to check out a very good album they might otherwise have slept on if they can get it for free, no questions asked.

And you should check Anti out, even if you’ve previously been of the mind that Rihanna is just a charismatic mouthpiece for other people’s expensive hits. Its range, smoked-out strangeness and rather fearless indifference to commercial concerns will surprise you.

If Anti signals the way forward for Rihanna — who’s always been a cut above most of her chart-topping peers, anyway — the second phase of her career suddenly looks very interesting indeed.

Anti is almost two albums in one, pivoting from futuristic robo-R&B in its first half to a more organic breed of soul in the second. A faithful, six-and-a-half-minute cover of Australian psych-rock warriors Tame Impala’s 'New Person, Same Old Mistakes' titled 'Same Ol’ Mistakes' barges into the middle of the mix to confuse matters even more.

Yes, you read that right. Rihanna covers Tame Impala on Anti.

Through the album’s early stages, meanwhile, there’s a lot of ill-tempered, downtempo moodiness that evokes electro-soul minimalists like FKA Twigs and Ibeyi more so than it does the traditional Rihanna oeuvre.

The influence of Drake also looms large; he only actually turns up on the mike (with go-to producer Boi-1da in tow) on the ping-ponging 'Work,' but Rihanna’s slurred, misanthropic phrasing on 'Desperado' and the caustic 'Needed Me' ('Didn’t they tell you that I was a savage? / Fuck your white horse and a carriage') bears the clear stamp of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.

'Woo,' for its part, plays like a distorted, druggy mutilation of a Weeknd track, roping Abel Tesfaye himself into the fray for good measure.

Anti’s latter stretches argue the case for Rihanna as a 'serious' artist from a different angle — by putting her voice ahead of the production and letting her sing in a straightforward fashion we haven’t often heard before.

It’s here, on the unadorned, acoustic ballads 'Never Ending' and 'Close to You' (which would evoke the Carpenters even if it didn’t share a title with one of their best-known songs) and the boozy, Amy Winehouse-esque snarl of 'Higher,' where it becomes clear that Rihanna’s vocal talents can work in a far broader variety of milieus than she’s previously let on. She sounds grittier and more purely human than ever before on 'Love on the Brain,' for instance, and suddenly an entire album’s worth of down-and-dirty, old-school soul seems within her reach.

That seems to be the point of Anti, mind you, which comes packaged with a poem in which Rihanna professes to be 'misunderstood.' This is her bid to open the door wide on any number of future possibilities, pop singles be damned, and it’s an incredibly successful one. She can go pretty much anywhere she wants from here."