This summer’s new Smurfs movie appears to be collecting millennial musicians old enough to have grown up aware of the series and who are now eager to add their stamp to the revival as parents. Last month’s “Higher Love” grafted DJ Khaled and Cardi B features onto a South Asian trap rework of Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” bubbling with sensual innuendos in honor of Smurfette, the lone woman in the Smurf clan. Today, “Friend of Mine” touts the return of dance-floor diva Rihanna, who hasn’t made a thumping house tune since 2016’s “This Is What You Came For” with Calvin Harris. Her soundtrack work favors ballads: Star Trek Beyond’s “Sledgehammer” is moody, howling Sia-pop; Black Panther 2’s “Lift Me Up” spoke to our grief after the death of Chadwick Boseman. “Friend of Mine” isn’t interested in knocking you down with intense high notes. It only wants to fill space and comfort.
The story’s simple: Rihanna (who voices Smurfette) has met someone who seems cool. The refrain is compact and echoing, a chorus unburdened by explanatory verses. This is not the Rih of Loud or even the Calvin Harris cut, who treasured formalism, structure, and ever-mounting tension. It’s more like remixes that whittle a vocal performance down to the tastiest bit and flood the mix with propulsive drums, like Adele edits of the 2010s or a Renaissance tour opening DJ slicing up a few choice pop-star vowels and turning the place out. There is an air of homecoming and of meeting today’s mainstream dance-pop paradigm. It feels like a subtle, tantalizing, long-overdue reward: the bop you wait years for, the smoky low-register run tucked away in the last 30 seconds for the listener who doesn’t skate early. The family-friendly sneaky-link anthem is a welcome improvement on the blandly inspirational album-reject material Rihanna submitted for the soundtrack for DreamWorks’ Home when she was zeroing in on a sonic profile for Anti.
Music’s parent-pop circuit is crowded; the chance to log a smash like Justin Timberlake’s aggressively chipper Trolls chart-topper “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” drives all sorts of curios — like the cloying original Jack Black songs about video games or endearing voice-over work by Anderson .Paak. The Smurfs tracks present a vision of the pop-star-and-animated-character collab that doesn’t look to get most of its streams from children screaming for a replay. “Friend of Mine” reaches that simplicity and repeated phrasing and melody that makes a cut like “Baby Shark” playroom-platinum-certified, but gets there peeling through American ballroom and European club music. You can read it as a wholesome word on fast friendship or an ode to a party encounter. Like “Higher Love,” “Friend of Mine” is catchy enough for the kids but makes sure to wink to Mom and Dad in the back of the room. It suggests a new approach for Rihanna’s music in the mom-ionaire era without giving away too much; it raises the age-old question of where R9 is.
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