“My band is ugly as shit,” Rihanna mused during a break between songs at Sunday night’s Anti World Tour stop at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.

“They know that, though. Luckily they can play some good-ass instruments.”

Rihanna is one of very few people on this planet who could call you ugly and it would somehow come off like a great compliment.

Consider how cool you’d have to be for Rihanna to feel comfortable casually teasing you in front of thousands of people: that she is acknowledging you at all is paramount to anything else.

Rihanna’s “don’t give a fuck” persona has been written about extensively in recent years, ever since her somewhat darker 2012 album, Unapologetic, which was followed by a few years during which she was most visible to the public on her Instagram account, where her life seemed an impossibly chill collection of parties and galavanting with friends and vacations. She took quite some time (by her own standards) to release her follow-up, Anti, which represented a pretty significant departure from her previous collections. As we wrote when it came out in January, Anti is a “Sunday-afternoon album,” as opposed to an out-on-a-Friday-night or treadmill album.It’s soulful and hazy and, while there are definitely standouts, there are not the obvious “bangers” that her previous seven albums featured (save for straight-up smash first single “Work,” which has spent five weeks at the top of the Billboard singles chart). It was as though Rihanna was saying, with Anti, “I’ve already conquered the singles game; I want to put out a piece of cohesive art now,” and then went ahead and put out the Rihanna version of that, which has its slightly middling patches, but ultimately sounds—in its rawness and grit—like an Exactly the Album This Artist Wanted to Make album.

So it’s fitting that the corresponding tour for this “new era”—as she referred to it during the show—is one that feels minimalist and stripped down: less Pop Star, and more Mature Artist (Mature Artist Who Still Has a Penchant for Partying, that is). There was little in the way of set design or visual elements. The 28-year-old emerged from a white structure in the center of the arena at the beginning of the night (opening with the ballad “Stay,” off of Unapologetic, setting the tone for the staid-by-Rihanna-standards evening). She wore an oversize white coat—hood on—one of several cloaked, draped outfits she cycled through over the course of the night, all of which looked egregiously comfortable, and which gave her the appearance of being (the most fashionable version of) A Woman on Her Way to a Party in the Middle of a Blizzard.

She eventually made her way across a walkway—while performing “Pose,” an Anti bonus track, and one of the more rollicking songs on the record—vamping and preening. Once she reached the end of the walkway, and decamped for the stage, she remained there for the rest of the night. The aesthetic—the monochromatic leisure-wear clothing, and the sparse stage (two tarps were visible for the entire night, deflated on either side)—definitely evoked Kanye West’s Yeezy Season collections. For the most part, she sprinted through her prior hits, not giving the (spirited) audience much time to live with any of them. During a section in the middle, she performed a sequence of buoyant older jams (“Live Your Life,” “Run This Town,” “All of the Lights,” “Umbrella”) and she joyously danced, skipped, and spun around the stage, singing some, but seeming more like the Platonic Ideal of how one should move their body and bliss out to a Rihanna song—which, of course, makes sense, since she is Rihanna. Watching her be Rihanna is a delight like watching a supermodel strut or an athlete dunk—it’s regarding a triumph.

If Rihanna seemed to rush through some of her songs (the entire set was just under 90 minutes), she definitely, unsurprisingly, luxuriated most in the new Anti songs. Many of them—“Needed Me,” “Consideration”—came alive more in the live setting than they do on the album, perhaps due to Rihanna’s evident passion in selling them. “Work” was a bit of a missed opportunity, sandwiched into the middle of one of the sections and absent the Drake verse, but I would be lying if I said the woman in front of me did not turn around bemused as I wailed and flailed along to it, so it’s hard to say the rendition wasn’t wholly transformative. Her decision to close the show with Anti standout— but mid-tempo—“Kiss It Better” seemed indicative of her intentions for the night.