Yesterday, Sia shared a seconds-long preview of the song “Reaper,” which was originally meant to appear on Rihanna’s ANTI, but ended up not making its way onto it.(This trend connects all of the songs on Sia’s upcoming album, This Is Acting, whose title speaks to the fact that all of the tracks were originally written for other artists.) Today, Sia followed up the preview with the full audio of the song that she blatantly admitted to not caring about, in that she’s “not emotionally attached to it.”
The track is billed as co-written by Kanye, though Sia, speaking to Rolling Stone, gave a pretty funny, wholly unromantic rundown of the collaboration, and candidly pragmatic reasoning for why the song appears on the album:
They’ll entice me into a session by saying, “Rihanna will definitely be there” or “Kanye will definitely be there,” but it’s hilarious because I turn up and, almost always, they never come. So I went into the studio to write for Rihanna with Kanye and neither of them showed up and stayed for less than an hour. They had two tracks. They told me what they had wanted. There were notes from Kanye, and I can’t even remember what they were. I remember I just raced in and raced out, and I thought there was something about the chorus that seemed fun about this song, but I never thought it would see the light of day. My manager pushed for this song to be on the record, but I don’t care about it.
The song, which is also billed as co-produced by Kanye, is jauntily sung — in a moment where life is good, and worthy of savoring — in resistance to a reaper who “came to take [her] away.”
Listen:
Sia also shared the track list for This Is Acting, which will be available on January 29. Here it is, via Billboard:
1. Bird Set Free 2. Alive 3. One Million Bullets 4. Move Your Body 5. Unstoppable 6. Cheap Thrills 7. Reaper 8. House On Fire 9. Footprints 10. Sweet Design 11. Broken Glass 12. Space Between