Last month, Rihanna announced that she would be making her return to performance in the most dramatic fashion. Revealing that she is the Super Bowl Halftime Show performer next year, she sparked fan speculation that her long-awaited ninth album would follow shortly thereafter with an accompanying tour. It’s been a while since we’ve seen her on stage and fans are rightly excited by the possibility of doing so again sometime in the upcoming year. Given her profile, fans are pretty sure that she’d be playing no less than stadiums on such a tour, with no fewer than nine albums worth of material to choose from.
Will Rihanna go on a stadium tour in 2023?
According to a report by industry insider site Hits Daily Double, Rihanna is among the big-name superstars most likely to make their returns to touring next year — a list that includes Beyonce, Ed Sheeran, and Taylor Swift. With her planned Super Bowl performance in February, the time would be right to release a new album — which would, of course, mean the perfect time to push a new tour, as well.
Rihanna hasn’t toured since 2016 when she released her Grammy-nominated album Anti, so fans would undoubtedly scoop up tickets almost as soon as they went on sale. They have been clamoring for a new album for the past few years (and growing ever more impatient), which Rihanna herself has referenced in joking interviews and social media responses. She’s been teasing new material for quite some time, telling Associated Press in 2021, “You’re not going to expect what you hear.” Earlier this year, she reiterated this statement in an interview with Vogue but remained vague about details such as producers, collaborators, release dates, or even a title.
HDD has posited, though, that she may not want to do these things after her Super Bowl halftime show set; instead, a residency would allow her to stay close to home (and her new baby), while her non-music ventures — Savage X Fenty, Fenty Beauty, and collabs with Puma — might ultimately be much more lucrative than risking fans’ ire by putting out a potentially disappointing project. However, the way things are going in Stan World (aka Twitter), that might not matter. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see.