What Now

What Now: Creation, Recording, and Chart History

What Now is a pop and R&B ballad recorded by Rihanna, released in 2013 from her seventh studio album Unapologetic. The song was written by Rihanna, Lukasz Gottwald (known professionally as Dr. Luke), Henry Walter (known as Cirkut), and Makeba Riddick-Joelle. The production team responsible for the track brought together a set of collaborators who had collectively been central to the construction of commercial pop music throughout the preceding decade, each contributing expertise in a specific dimension of the recording process.

Unapologetic was Rihanna's seventh studio album in as many years, a release pace that had become one of the defining characteristics of her commercial operation. The album was the first of her career to debut at number one on the Billboard 200, and it was released at a time when Rihanna had established herself as one of the most commercially dominant recording artists in the world. The album contained a range of sonic styles, from club-oriented electronic productions to more introspective ballads, and What Now sat firmly within the latter category, providing emotional depth and tonal contrast to the more uptempo material that surrounded it.

The song was constructed around a production palette of synthesizer textures and a prominent guitar element that gave it a rock-influenced edge within an otherwise pop and R&B sonic context. Dr. Luke and Cirkut's production choices created a sound that was simultaneously arena-scaled and emotionally intimate, a combination that suited Rihanna's vocal delivery and the lyrical content's focus on confusion and emotional searching. The inclusion of the guitar element was a deliberate choice that gave the track a textural distinctiveness within the album's broader sonic environment, marking it as a song that drew on a wider range of musical influences than a conventional R&B ballad would suggest.

Rihanna's vocal performance on the track was noted for its emotional directness, with her delivery conveying a sense of genuine searching rather than polished emotional performance. The song builds through its structure, moving from a relatively restrained opening to a climactic vocal expression that utilized the full range and power she had demonstrated consistently throughout her career. This structural arc gave the song its character as a slow-building emotional release rather than an immediately accessible pop hook, distinguishing it from the majority of her commercial single releases.

What Now was released as a single in November 2013, entering the Billboard Hot 100 on November 9 at position 96. Its climb was methodical, reaching its peak of number 25 during the week of December 7, 2013, after spending eight weeks on the chart in total. The song's relatively modest Hot 100 peak relative to some of Rihanna's more dance-oriented material reflected the format preferences of Hot 100 methodology at the time, which weighted airplay formats that favored uptempo pop over slower, more atmospherically complex ballads.

The track performed more strongly on format-specific charts where ballads had traditionally found a more receptive audience. It also earned significant international chart attention, reflecting the global nature of Rihanna's audience, which had developed across more than a decade of consistent international commercial activity. In the United Kingdom and other European markets, the song's atmospheric production and emotional directness resonated with audiences who responded to the album's more introspective qualities.

The music video for the song was a visually ambitious production featuring Rihanna in a series of transformative environments that reflected the song's themes of disorientation and searching. The video's production values were consistent with the large-scale visual presentations that had become standard for Rihanna's single releases, and it received substantial digital viewership on YouTube and other platforms, accumulating hundreds of millions of views over the years following its initial release.

In the context of Unapologetic's commercial and critical reception, What Now was identified as one of the album's most emotionally substantial moments. Critics who noted the album's tonal range frequently cited the song as evidence that Rihanna's artistry extended beyond the dance-floor-oriented material that generated the majority of her chart activity, demonstrating a capacity for reflective emotional expression that rounded out her artistic profile and confirmed the breadth of her creative range. The song's enduring streaming performance in subsequent years affirmed its place within a catalog of recordings that continued to attract new listeners long after the original commercial moment had passed.