Bright Like a Diamond, Rihanna.

There's something to Rihanna that ignites the respective intrigues of disparate peoples. She may be as dimwitted as your average flash-pan pop leviathan, yet she's been styled immaculately and live she's a total powerhouse too. Moreover, where others incite exasperation with tabloid ubiquity and general tunelessness, you can't help but sense that her greatest triumph is in the gloriously trashy R'n'B the likes of Ester Dean and Calvin Harris have dotingly scribed for her and her salacious approach to 2k12 pop. She almost seems to actually care about the music she pumps out, and it shows no sign of stopping just yet.

The first glimmer of brilliance to her latest track Diamonds, the lead single from her as yet untitled seventh, is its artwork. With Golden Virginia exchanged for gemstones worth well over their weight in gold within a Rizla, it's another subtly provocative manoeuvre from her marketing team. Although it's the song itself – a sort of emancipatory urging to "shine bright like a diamond" that for the most part plays off the hackneyed allegory of lovers being "like diamonds in the sky" – that glows with most gleam. A thunderous, if soft house thrum underpins RiRi's strangely emotionless vocals and certainly as far as her contribution is concerned, this one's a case of a deficiency in imperfection never quite equating to complete perfection. Although in a city in which the likes of the odious Pitbull and, worse still, the obsequious Ed Sheeran prove the most pirated, this is about as close as pop has come in a while.

Expect new musics November.