Maybe. I personally think she taking advantage of a limitation in her appeal and using industry clout to suppress that. Shes not "on her last legs", but a flop is a flop. Rihanna has never been an album artist. Her singles always kill but her albums dont sell that much relative to her popularity. They come out sounding like Greatest Hits for whatever her camp was working on that year. This album was her trying to appeal to critics by the sounds of it, and they waited so long to drop it. If the album was judged by the conventional means of units shipped/sold or purchased iTunes d/ls, it would look bad compared to her peers and the media/social media would start chirping about it. They tried to protect her from that.
