“Hey Mr DJ won’t you turn the music up?”

When Rihanna released her debut album Music Of The Sun in 2005 she was 17 years old, and the album’s opening track ‘Pon De Replay’ was about a DJ not playing music loud enough. Now in 2010, the Barbadian has released Loud, whose opening track ‘S&M’ features the line “I may be bad but I’m perfectly good at it. Sex in the air, I don’t care I like the smell of it”.

Watching pop stars grow up (or age) is always interesting. The best example of this is Michael Jackson, whose rise from child star to adult mega-star is one of the most fascinating stories in pop music. Rihanna’s career so far is obviously not one that can be compared to that of the King Of Pop but is interesting none the less. With each album Rihanna has released she’s subtly re-worked her image without ever alienating her fan base.

Less than 8 months after her sun-drenched debut album, she released A Girl Like Me, which saw her singing about being an unfaithful lover in one song whilst laying vocals over a sample of Soft Cell’s 1981 hit ‘Tainted Love’. She was growing up.

In 2007 Good Girl Gone Bad was released and with it ‘Umbrella’, the longest running UK number one of the decade. Moving away from the dancehall influence seen on her first two albums, the word ‘bad’ in the album title was intended in the same sense as Michael Jackson’s Bad as she explained in an interview with Capital FM at the time; “Bad has its own term to every individual and in my case it just means I’ve gotten a little rebellious on the album, broken out of my shell and I’m taking risks.”

With every album Rihanna was growing up. Taking her sound in new directions whilst always putting out pop songs of the highest calibre, working with some of the top writers and producers around. With her 2009 album Rated R she delivered even more hits, with songs touching on various genres from dubstep to rock.

On Loud, the girl who once sang a song about music not being at a high enough volume is now singing about S&M, drinking and guns. The synth heavy album is full of potential singles, from the Avril Lavigne sampling ‘Cheers (Drink To That)’ to ‘Raining Men’, the dubstep dance-athon featuring Nicki Minaj.

This is Rihanna’s fifth album and she’s only 22. With so much more growing up to do, one can only imagine where she’ll go next.