Rihanna says her next album will be 'unexpected'
There have been plenty of rumours about what direction the long-awaited record will take, including talk of it being a reggae album.But Rihanna, whose real name is Robyn Fenty, was quick to dispel those."Way off! There's no genre now. That's why I waited. Every time, I was just like, 'No, it's not me. It's not right," she said.
"This much time away from music needs to count for the next thing everyone hears. It has to count," she added."I cannot put up anything mediocre. After waiting eight years, you might as well just wait some more."While not revealing any more, she told the magazine that she was "feeling really optimistic."I feel like I've finally cracked it, girl!," she said.The multi-Grammy Award winner, who began her career in 2003, is best known for songs such as Umbrella, Shut Up And Drive and What's My Name?Despite stepping away from music in recent years, she has been keeping busy with her make-up and skincare brands.Rihanna says fashion has helped her personal 'rediscovery'In the interview, she said she was focusing on living in the moment.She also shared her thoughts on growing older, using an expletitive to describe the process, while saying "it's also a blessing"."My legacy is right now. That's all I have the most control over. My legacy is what I do with my time at this moment".Rihanna has two young sons, RZA and Riot, with her longtime partner, rapper A$AP Rocky.Earlier this week, the musician, whose legal name is Rakim Mayers, was found not guilty of firing a gun at a former friend by a jury in Los Angeles.
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Graziadaily
33 minutes ago
- Graziadaily
Tradwife Has Been Added To The Cambridge Dictionary - But What Does It Mean?
We live in an age where new words are creeping into our lexicon all the time, thanks to the internet and big shifts in popular culture. And there's no better way to see these shifts than what's been added to the Cambridge dictionary each year. For 2025, one of the new words is 'tradwife' (along with Gen Z's fave slang Skibidi and TikTok's delulu). But what does tradwife mean? And who are some popular examples? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a tradwife is a 'married woman, especially one who posts on social media, who stays at home doing cooking, cleaning, etc. and has children that she takes care of.' Shorthand for 'traditional wife', the term has been around since 2018, but has become more popular after a growing trend on Instagram and TikTok has shown more young women embrace traditional gender roles. Two of the most famous tradwifes on social media are Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm, and Nara Smith. Both have amassed cult followings on social media, where they show videos of their daily life cooking, caring for the home, and raising children - all while looking impossibly glamorous and together while they do it. In an interview with Harper's Bazaar last year, Nara addressed her thoughts on being labelled a tradwife, saying she doesn't view herself in that way. 'That's one of the narratives that I have a really hard time wrapping my head around: the tradwife, whatever it is,' she said. 'You don't see me getting on a plane, hopping to New York, modelling, coming back – all while I have a newborn – paying bills, filming content, getting my kids dressed.' In a 2024 interview with The Sunday Times, we had a glimpse into glimpse Neeleman's day-to-day life as a mother of eight on the family's Utah farm. The interview garnered significant interest, because Neelman also spoke about how she didn't associate herself with the term. 'We are traditional in the sense that it's a man and a woman,' she said of her dynamic with her husband, Daniel. 'We have children, but I do feel like we're paving a lot of paths that haven't been paved before. So for me to have the label of a traditional woman,' adding 'I don't know if I identify with that.' The content is both incredibly popular on social media, and also controversial. Caro Claire Burke, a media critic who has been investigating the growth of Trad Wife influencers, previously told Grazia this is down to the way the working women who want children have been failed by society. 'In America [like the UK], our childcare situation is abysmal, there is no support for working families,' Burke says. 'Now there are so many women who are looking at these idealised versions of motherhood – or women to whom mothering isn't immediately associated with financial stress – and it's so addictive to watch because it's something we just can't get right.' She continued: 'These women are homemakers but they're also businesswomen profiting off this performance of homemaking. They're inordinately wealthy... enjoying their lives cooking these beautiful meals and spending time with their children, it's like the one major thing woman can't have – a successful career and be with your children.' Alice Hall is the Staff Writer at Grazia UK. She was previously a Junior Features Writer for The Daily Telegraph. At Grazia, she writes news and features about pop culture, dating, health, politics and interiors.
Scotsman
4 hours ago
- Scotsman
Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Pussy Riot: Riot Days The Invisible Spirit
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Pussy Riot: Riot Days ★★★★ Summerhall (Venue 26) until 23 August This production was first seen at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2018, when Russia's action in Ukraine was still viewed as a regional skirmish and protest punk group Pussy Riot could still claim relatively autonomy to make anti-Putin work without fear of much greater reprisal than harassment and possible imprisonment, both of which they endured. Yet the story which once formed the centrepiece of Riot Days feels a long time ago now. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Pussy Riot: Riot Days Based on the memoir by Pussy Riot founding member Maria Alyokhina, and performed here by Alyokhina alongside two other female members of the group in trademark fluorescent balaclavas, it was originally a chronicle of state artistic repression and its resistance. Alyokhina infamously helped perform the 'Punk Prayer' on the altar of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012, 'forty seconds of crime' which saw her jailed in a Ural mountain prison for two years. Riot Days' original account of this is still here, set to a cataclysmic live electronic soundtrack by Eric J Breitenbach of Canadian band New Age Doom. The sound is conventional industrial punk, but the autobiographical lyrical content is unique and powerful, from the thrashy, flailing revisitation of the Prayer itself, to the doomy, funereal grind (the trio literally process through the audience) of Alyokhina's transportation to her oppressive, snowed-in prison. Last time we saw Alyokhina's release and return to protest as public enemy number one at the Sochi Olympics. Now there's so much more to say. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The material is split into separately-themed song chapters, with new ones added on gay persecution, Alexei Navalny, the war in Ukraine and the concurrent clampdown at home, and finally a very tense segment about her escape from Russia. Masters of the slogan, at one point the group declares 'freedom doesn't exist unless you fight for it every day'. Alyokhina, we are reminded, remains a wanted woman in her home country. David Pollock The Invisible Spirit ★★★★ Space, Niddry Street (Venue 9) until 25 August. Colours Run ★★★★ Summerhall (Venue 26) until 25 August If plays about Scottish history feature at all on the Edinburgh Fringe, they often focus on the big, familiar figures that every visitor to the city might recognise, notably Mary Queen of Scots. The Invisible Spirit, though, based on the book by the late, great Scottish journalist Ken Roy, is a rare exception, a searching and intelligent history of modern Scotland that covers the vital years between 1945 and 1975 - from the end of the Second World War to coming of North Sea oil - but is still full of resonances for Scotland today. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The story is told through the voices of two mighty Scottish newspapers of the time, the long gone Bulletin - about which, as Roy tells us, no mother in Scotland ever had a bad word to say - and the Daily Record, still very much with us today. There's also a character called The Scotswoman, played with style by Elaine Stirrat, who offers a different view of what was then a heavily male dominated public world. And between them, these three lead us through the significant and revealing high points of those years, from VE Night in George Square, Glasgow, through the launch of the Edinburgh Festival and the shocking Peter Manuel trial and hanging of the 1950s, to the establishment sex scandals of the 1960s, the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in of the early 1970s, the terrible Ibrox disaster of 1971, and Jimmy Reid's mighty rectorial address at Glasgow University in 1972, three years before the first oil came ashore. The play is sharp-eyed and unsparing about the self-protective instincts of Scotland's small and over-comfortable establishment, and lifted at every turn by the sheer, elegant power and wit of Kenneth Roy's descriptive writing. And with Chris Alexander turning in an eloquent and perfectly-pitched performance as The Bulletin (the show's narrator), and strongly supported by Fergus John McCann as The Record, The Invisible Spirit emerges as a smart and sometimes moving contribution to the recent history of a nation that too often allows others to tell its story, in a way that Kenneth Roy resisted brilliantly, throughout his writing life. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Mikey Burnett's play Colours Run, at Summerhall, is as much an Edinburgh show as The Invisible Spirit is a Glasgow one; although it boldly suggests a very different Edinburgh from the establishment one conjured up by Ken Roy. Pongo and Pete are brothers living together in the city, both strong Hibs fans; but Pongo, the older and dominant brother, is also a fighting football casual, and as the play begins, he arrives home on a Hibs-Hearts derby day to tell Pete that he may have killed a man in a post-match attack. This crisis triggers a fraught conversation between the brothers in which the strange and unsettling nature of their relationship is steadily revealed, as the submissive Pete - who rarely goes out, but has a true and loving heart - tries to comfort Pongo. Colours Run is a surreal play in many ways, the ghosts of Pinter, Genet and other mid-century modernist masters hovering over the stage as Pete dons a dress that belonged to their late mother, and the two dance awkwardly around their battered sofa; and with Ruaraidh Murray and Sean Langtree delivering two exquisitely observed performances, the play quietly forges a strong and revealing link between Scottish working-class drama, and 20th century European theatre at its strangest, and most challenging. Joyce McMillan Fly, You Fools! ★★★★ Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Lo-fi majesty sounds like a contradiction, but theatre company Recent Cutbacks conjure exactly that off with glorious theatrical inventiveness. The American troupe, already Fringe favourites for their Jurassic Park spoof Hold onto Your Butts, return with a DIY Lord of the Rings that out-epics Peter Jackson's franchise at a fraction of the cost. Armed with an onstage foley studio, shadow puppets and an arsenal of household junk, they cobble together The Fellowship of the Ring from scratch. Gloves flap into birds, coconuts become horses. There is fan service, winks to internet memes and all the quotable lines that have lodged themselves into pop culture, but the real joy lies in watching them skewer the pomposity of Hollywood. Gandalf's forced-perspective grandeur is gleefully undone, with jabs reserved for postering hunks and glitzy celebrities. Fandom and farce collide here, and in the wreckage something oddly majestic emerges. Alexander Cohen Failsafe ★ Dovecot Studios (Venue 198) until 24 August Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Failsafe, which explores a suicide and sex pact between two former schoolmates, promises the brand of black humour famed by cult TV phenomena like The End of the F***ing World. Where the 2017 serial (based on a comic book of the same name) excels in its witty and sensitive portrayal of two young, doomed adults, Failsafe visibly struggles. The lighting design, which multiplies the performers shadows and casts them in a range of colours, is to be commended. However, this is not nearly enough to carry the 90-minute production, which can hopefully enjoy a more rounded life in the future. Josephine Balfour-Oatts Jane Eyre Wasn't a Whore ★★ The Loft at PBH's Free Fringe @ The Outhouse Bar (Venue 99) until 23 August Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Sometimes when I get emotional, I see my life in Brontë quotes,' says Carly Polistina as Anne, a struggling actress living and working in New York City. Cue her divine plan to secure a role in a Brontë project, and as fate would have it, navigate the realm of modern dating. Bookworms will be delighted with this piece and its literary references. It is both brilliantly performed by Polistina and charming as it provides a close reading of the cutthroat and competitive acting world. However, the overall narrative lacks the critical discussion, immediacy and intrigue promised by the title. Josephine Balfour-Oatts
Daily Mirror
7 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Alan Shearer called out on Match of the Day analysis as he responds to Sunderland question
Alan Shearer was noticeably quiet on Match of the Day as Mark Chapman and Wayne Rooney discussed Sunderland's Premier League opener - but the Newcastle legend has now revealed why Alan Shearer has lifted the lid on his silence as the Match of the Day panel analysed Sunderland's 3-0 demolition of West Ham United. The Newcastle United icon made his return to television screens on Saturday evening alongside fresh faces Mark Chapman and Wayne Rooney to dissect the day's Premier League fixtures. Yet it seemed as though Shearer was rendered speechless when the programme opened with Sunderland's win over West Ham at the Stadium of Light. Following the highlights, Chapman turned to Rooney for his verdict on the game, with the Manchester United legend heaping praise on Regis Le Bris' men. At the end of the segment, Shearer finally weighed in on West Ham's performance, without making any reference to his bitter rivals. Later, while appearing on The Rest Is Football, Micah Richards was quick to wind up the 55-year-old over his lack of analysis on the Black Cats. The Manchester City icon said: "Alan, when Sunderland were playing, why did you not do any of the analysis mate? "Why did you leave it all to Wayne? You didn't say a word for about four minutes? What's going on?" Shearer laughed before responding: "You know how it works, Micah," while Gary Lineker chimed in: "We'll discuss that game when we come to the second half, but Wayne Rooney was given that game. You know how it works, stop trying to stir it up." Shearer was quick to hit back at Richards' observation, jokingly saying: "I'm more concerned about you by the way. How tight is that shirt on your arms? I was worried about the circulation in your arms today. I was looking at your guns thinking, 'That is a tight one, man.'" Later in the podcast, Shearer and Lineker discussed Sunderland's home win over West Ham, with Lineker introducing the topic: "I tell you who are back, back in the Premier League, back in with a bang - one of your favourite teams Alan, Sunderland." Shearer responded with a chuckle: "Believe it or not, I've got a few Sunderland pals, and my texts were going this morning, 'For f*** sake, why didn't you say anything positive about Sunderland? You just let Wayne Rooney do all the talking about Sunderland and you just went on about West Ham.' "Sunderland were brilliant, the atmosphere was great. They deserved their three points. There you go, does that sound alright?" Lineker then chimed in: "Do you want to remind people, Alan? The way Match of the Day works is that you are designated a match each, and Wayne Rooney would have done that game because he was designated that match. Which one were you doing? Because that was a 3 o'clock one as well. "You were doing the Spurs Burnley game, so your focus was on that. So it wasn't an anti-Sunderland thing, even though you are anti-Sunderland, let's be honest." Quick to take a cheeky swipe at Sunderland, Shearer added: "Listen, they've been that long out of the Premier League, they forget how Match of the Day works, you see." The Black Cats were in superb form as they celebrated their Premier League comeback on Saturday afternoon, weathering an early storm from the likes of Jarrod Bowen before turning the match around after half-time. Eliezer Mayenda broke the deadlock for the newly-promoted side 61 minutes in with a perfectly-placed header from the centre of the penalty area, before hometown hero Dan Ballard powered home another header 12 minutes later to put the result beyond doubt. Super-sub Wilson Isidor wasted no time in leaving his mark on proceedings after replacing Mayenda, collecting the ball wide from Chemsdine Talbi in stoppage time before driving at the West Ham defence, cutting inside from the right, and finessing the ball past Mads Hermansen. Shearer would have been disappointed with the Magpies' display in Saturday's early fixture, as they were held to a frustrating draw against ten-man Aston Villa on the road. Anthony Gordon was thrust into an unfamiliar striker's role with Alexander Isak absent amid his ongoing transfer speculation, but struggled to make much of an impact. Newcastle will now shift their focus to reigning Premier League champions Liverpool at St. James' Park on Monday, August 25, while Sunderland are set to visit Burnley at Turf Moor on Saturday, August 23.
