S&M

The harmony is by design stripped to its skeleton — a four-chord loop in natural minor that never reaches a dominant seventh or any chromatic colour. Stargate and Sandy Vee front-load all the interest into texture, rhythm, and timbre, so the chord changes function as a rhythmic scaffold. That restraint is what makes the track so immediately graspable on the dance floor and so easy to loop for three and a half minutes without fatigue.

The track was written by Ester Dean, Sandy Vee, and Stargate (Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Storleer Eriksen), a production team already embedded in Rihanna's creative circle. Dean, whose melodic instincts had shaped hits across multiple artists, brought the BDSM-themed hook concept; Stargate and Sandy Vee framed it in a driving electropop production that kept the provocation feeling playful rather than abrasive.

Built on Stargate and Sandy Vee's punchy synth production and co-written with Ester Dean, 'S&M' channels taboo subject matter into pure pop spectacle. It became one of the defining moments of Rihanna's Loud era, reaching #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 while its music video generated controversy that only amplified the song's commercial momentum. In the landscape of 2010s electropop, few tracks matched its combination of bluntness and accessibility.