When people write about Robyn Rihanna Fenty’s singing, they often use words like “flat” or “thin” or “limitations”—something that suggests her voice is the secret defect hiding in her otherwise-brilliant plumage, the limp disguised by the swagger. She “doesn’t have the range,” as the deathless meme had it. It is indisputably the aspect of her art that gets the least critical attention.

And yet listen to radio, when Rihanna isn’t on it—which, granted, isn’t too often—and you will hear molecules of her vocal style swarming around everywhere. Even-toned, husky but nasal, tinged with island breezes but essentially free of regional markers—that describes a whole lot of pop songs now, by a whole lot of people. My ears perked up most recently at the beginning of Lorde’s “Green Light”: Between the the lightly taunting way Lorde clips the word “bite” and the growling dip to “I hear sounds in my mind,” Rihanna’s ambient influence creeps in, like blunt smoke curling under a closed door.

Once you realize that Rihanna is the most influential vocal stylist of pop’s last decade, it becomes almost impossible to escape her. Pick any major contemporary dance-pop song in the ether, the sort that loudly greets you when you push open the big glass doors of a boutique clothing store—“Lean On,” by Major Lazer, for example, with its needling and vaguely militant chorus chant by the Danish singer-songwriter MØ—and then close your eyes and imagine it sung by Rihanna; Diplo, who wrote the song, sure did. Or imagine Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” sung by Rihanna, with the breathy verses and the reedy, pleading chorus. Once you do, it will be difficult to hear Bieber’s puppyish original as anything other than a glorified reference track that never found its proper home.

Last year, an 18-year-old Texan named Maggie Lindemann broke through with a vogueishly dark hit called “Pretty Girl.” As influences, she has cited people like Lana Del Rey and BANKS, and her lone-wolf image feels filtered through Lorde. But the second Lindemann opens her mouth on “Pretty Girl” it becomes pretty clear who her larger inspiration is—she is singing in Rihanna’s voice, or maybe more accurately, Rihanna Voice.