When my engineer, Morning, presses record, I start to feel the beat a lot. What you hear in the beginning of “Riri” wasn’t like purposeful. That was just natural. It was just like what I was singing right before I was about to say the first line. The biggest challenge for “Riri” was the second verse. Like the start of the second verse. The beat kind of completely switches on the second half of “Riri.” Pasqué put that together a year after we had made this song. We thought that the song kind of got boring if you didn’t have something to add to it on the second verse or something to switch it up.

In a press release speaking on the release of the track’s music video made on the day of its release, Aminé said:

We shot this video before the murder of George Floyd & my knowledge of the Breonna Taylor case […] but I felt compelled to delay its release for obvious reasons. Activism is essential right now so I put my focus there for the past few weeks. We skipped editing sessions to march in the Black Lives Matter protests. I’m dropping the “Riri” video today because it’s important to show black joy in a time where we’re constantly seeing imagery of pain and suffering.

We were in this editing room for like, five days straight, trying to make “Riri” and edit “Riri” together. And we had that scene, and I was supposed to be rapping towards the camera, and that was the scene. But we just made that decision off the cuff. So I was like, ‘it’d be really cool to see myself, photograph myself.’ That wasn’t even in the treatment for the video. We just decided that on the spot. A lot of scenes from like, a lot of my music videos kind of happen on set as well. 

— via GQ