It’s been more than 1,100 days since Rihanna last released an album, 2012’s Unapologetic. Before that she’d knocked out six albums in seven years, or seven in seven if you count a repacked version of Good Girl Gone Bad featuring three new massive hit singles (in other words, a standard Rihanna album).

In a pop world complicated by staggered release strategies, buzz singles and endless teasing, Rihanna was always a beacon of reliability. As November approached you could rest easy knowing there’d be a 9/10 lead single, a vaguely controversial video, a semi-amazing album and a lovely ballad. There’d be a tour, loads of magazine covers and some incredible Instagram shots perhaps involving baby monkeys.

Unfortunately, the effortlessness of old has vanished, replaced instead by the messy, endlessly drawn out and Samsung-sponsored Anti album campaign; one that’s so far been defined by its desire to shake off the commercial shackles of being a massive pop star and its lack of actual new music. But this could have all been saved if she’d done the one thing no one seems to think about any more and released a palette-cleansing, Abba-Gold-level-amazing Greatest Hits album, drawn a line under her past and started anew.

Rihanna herself outlined this need to distance herself from her previous discography back in March. “I’ve made a lot of songs that are just really big songs … they just blow up,” she moaned while promoting the animated film Home. “Not that they weren’t real music, but I just wanted to focus on things that felt real, that felt soulful, that felt for ever.”

This need to create music with real soul first emerged in January with the release of FourFiveSeconds featuring Kanye West, Paul McCartney, one of Wilson Phillips and Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors fame. That was followed by American Oxygen, a politically charged statement that peaked at No 78 in America. “I wanted an album that I could perform in 15 years, not any songs that were burnt out,” she continued. “I find that when I get on stage now I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. I want to make songs that are timeless.”

While those words cut like a knife to anyone who’s lost themselves to We Found Love, drunkenly screamed “oh na na, what’s my name?” or waggled an umbrella to Umbrella, no one can deny that Rihanna hasn’t earned the right to shake things up. What a greatest hits album would have allowed her to do is honour and celebrate that back catalogue – she’s released 34 singles, two-thirds of them being in the upper echelons of incredible – but also carefully plant the seeds for where she wants to go next.

When Madonna – arguably the definitive singles artist of the 1980s – released The Immaculate Collection in 1990 it was to draw a line under her 80s imperial phase and, via the new songs (Justify My Love and Rescue Me), hint at where she was going next on 1992’s Erotica album. In this perfect world I’ve created in my head, Rihanna’s two-disc Greatest Hits (four if you get the deluxe) would cover every era-defining banger, every mid-paced sex-jam and every tear-stained ballad, plus have room for FourFiveSeconds, American Oxygen and the sonic assault that is Bitch Better Have My Money. Their sonic disparity wouldn’t have mattered because everyone experiments (read: rushes) when it comes to the new songs tagged on to Greatest Hits albums.

Obviously we’re now in a digital and streaming age where Greatest Hits albums are sort of superfluous, with most fans able to chuck together their own singles collection playlist. But what a stopgap like this would have done for Rihanna is brought her some more time to figure out what exactly it is she wants to do next – there are rumours Anti’s delay is partly down to the lack of a lead single, with recording still ongoing – and to draw a line under what came before; to mark the first chapter as “hits” and start chapter two without such pressures (if Anti’s rumoured release is via a Samsung phone and Tidal then she’s clearly not that bothered about chart positions any more). What we’re left with at the moment is a lack of confidence and a sense of panic – two things you’d never have been able to say about Rihanna three years ago.