Rihanna teases ‘Lift Me Up,’ new single from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack

Beauty mogul and occasional music maker Rihanna is officially heading to Wakanda.

Yes, the rumors are true! Rihanna has recorded a new song for the soundtrack of director Ryan Coogler’s highly anticipated Black Panther sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Titled “Lift Me Up,” the forthcoming single serves as a tribute to the life and legacy of the original movie’s late star Chadwick Boseman, and was co-written with Tems, Ludwig Göransson, and Coogler.

The track drops this Friday, but you can hear a snippet of it below.

This announcement comes on the heels of murmurs that Rihanna penned another song to run during the coveted end credits of the Marvel sequel, succeeding Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “All the Stars,” which topped the charts and received accolades and award nominations — including Best Original Song at the 91st Academy Awards — following the first film’s 2018 release.

The soundtrack for the original movie, which was headlined by Boseman, featured an all-star lineup that included Future, Khalid, Swae Lee, the Weeknd, Anderson .Paak, and James Blake.

Rihanna

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images Rihanna

RiRi’s Wakanda Forever tracks would mark her first new music since her 2016 album, Anti, though she’s had guest spots on tracks like DJ Khaled’s “Wild Thoughts” and Lamar’s “Loyalty,” as well as on 2020’s “Believe It” with PARTYNEXTDOOR. Those cameos, however, have simply not been enough for the Navy, who have been pestering the new mom to release R9 for years.

The fortuitous news comes after the NFL tapped Rihanna to headline the 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show in September, a move that signaled the possibility of fresh music from the artist. She famously turned down the opportunity to headline 2019’s show, citing her support for Colin Kaepernick and the NFL’s repeated silencing of protests against police brutality as her reason. That same year, the NFL entered into a partnership with Jay-Z and Roc Nation to “enhance the NFL’s live game experiences and to amplify the league’s social justice efforts.”

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As for the Black Panther sequel, plot details have largely been kept under wraps, but another character will take up the Black Panther mantle following Boseman’s death in 2020 from cancer. Wakanda Forever will feature many familiar faces — Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong’o, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Danai Gurira) — in addition to newcomers like Tenoch Huerta’s villainous Namor.

Black Panther Wakanda Forever

Eli Adé/Marvel Studios Danai Gurira as Okoye and Letitia Wright as Shuri in ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’

“I had to find a way that I felt like I could keep going and a way that our Black Panther family could keep going,” Coogler said in EW’s recent Black Panther 2 cover story. “I started to come up with a film that had elements of the film that we had just finished writing, but also applied the themes that the people who were hurting just as much as me could actually perform and execute and come out on the other side whole.”

He added, “This film has the fog of loss over it, and anamorphic lenses warp the image a little bit. Sometimes when you go through profound loss, it can warp how you look at the world.”

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hits theaters Nov. 11.

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