By 2020, Ariana Grande had achieved saintlike status in pop. No one would argue with it. At her 2017 show in Manchester, 22 fans were killed in a terrorist attack, and she was praised for her grace when she threw the all-star One Love Manchester benefit concert just two weeks later. The following year, her still-beloved ex-boyfriend, the rapper Mac Miller, died of an accidental overdose. She then got together with comedian Pete Davidson but swiftly broke off their engagement in her enduring grief. Her music evolved from enjoyable post-Nickelodeon bad-girl R&B to process these anguishes with fleet sophistication, and Grande’s name came to populate the writing credits: 2018’s at-ease Sweetener was her statement of survival. Five months later came Thank U, Next, a breezier assertion of acceptance and pleasure that was written and recorded in just a few weeks, after Grande said she wanted to be freed from pop’s heavy logistics to release music like a rapper – to “talk to my fans and sing and write music and drop it the way these boys do”. One year on, Positions precariously navigated the compatibility of healing and moving on. The latter was a minor dip in quality, but the intimacy and immediacy of Grande’s reborn project felt transcendent.
Her tentative recovery continued when she got married in 2021. Two years later, it was over – and unfounded speculation about Grande’s alleged infidelity, as well as taking up with her married (but separated) co-star in a forthcoming film adaptation of the musical Wicked, prompted a backlash, despite “a source” telling People that there was no overlap with either party’s prior relationship. Social media gossips made viral clips compiling “evidence” of Grande’s alleged history of cheating. At the end of 2023, the press-shy musician posted a rare statement on Instagram about feeling “so deeply misunderstood by people who don’t know me, who piece whispers together and make what they want out of me and their assumptions of my life”. In January, her Vogue-referencing comeback single Yes, And? reminded haters “your business is yours and mine is mine / Why do you care so much whose dick I ride?”, which unfortunately also highlighted the drama to anyone blissfully aware of it. Apparently many did care: she lost 360,000 Instagram followers after the song’s announcement. It’s a dispiriting reminder of the fickleness of public favour and the entitlement over other people’s business that social media has stirred – the souring of Grande’s unusual vulnerability.
Fortunately, the outcry hasn’t stymied her candour on her opulent, bumping seventh album, which moves from self-scouring to implications of her ex’s treachery – suggesting she may previously have been keeping her powder dry for Eternal Sunshine. There’s delicious provocation: “I’ll play whatever part you need me to,” she sings to whoever’s smearing her on True Story, “and I’ll be good in it too”; “You got me misunderstood but at least I look this good,” on We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love). With its lurching bass and flinching vocals, the former evokes Jai Paul remixing Justin Timberlake’s betrayal ur-text Cry Me a River, while the latter shares the juddering synths and chiptune flourishes of Robyn’s homewrecking anthem Call Your Girlfriend – though the effect is jarringly retro.
With these knowing references, Grande toys with perceptions of victimhood and villainy that she knows she can’t control. But beyond these barbs, she’s more interested in the unpredictability of connection – the album opens with her asking “how can I tell if I’m in the right relationship?” – a sometimes painful, sometimes ecstatic fact of adult life that she handles with realism and compassion comparable to Adele’s divorce album, 30. The title track alludes to Michel Gondry’s 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the impossibility of easily forgetting; sparkling like a miniature ballerina in a pink velvet box, I Wish I Hated You is a futile yearning for absolutes. Grande understands that living means salvaging what you can from the wreckage and moving on, and the risk-aversion and second-guessing of Positions makes way for action and instinct here, even when it’s destructive: with trap-Aaliyah hauteur, the possessive The Boy Is Mine “takes full accountability for all these tears” she has caused yet concludes “but I can’t ignore my heart” (underscored, in the official lyrics, by six exclamation marks). Her lyrics are piercingly direct, making the tedious astrology explainer Saturn Returns Interlude, a pro-forma irritant about growth, even more redundant.
Unlike some peers, Grande has never been one for whole-cloth reinvention, and her post-2020 run reflects an artist dedicated to refining the links between Hollywood grandeur, classic R&B and trap’s staccato fizz. Primarily helmed by Grande and core collaborators Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh (her staple co-writer Victoria Monét, now a solo artist in her own right, isn’t here), Eternal Sunshine is more full-bodied than the silvery, breathy Positions, though the album starts with a bit of a feint in Bye, a lavish orchestral-disco showstopper that soundtracks our heroine’s freedom. Otherwise Grande’s vibe is nocturnal-casual, and almost disarmingly so – riffling through devastating sentiments about lies, or being too much for someone who, on Don’t Wanna Break Up Again, turns up the TV to drown out her tears, with such breezy vocal virtuosity that the trauma flutters by.
Maybe that’s where it’s best left: at any rate, it doesn’t infect the optimism of the two closing songs, which celebrate the imperfection and ease of new love. We know that Grande has been here before, and from the off-kilter, minor-key vocal motifs and strange, slack guitar of Imperfect for You, you sense she knows the folly of her hope. Love is fallible. Contrary to what some fans might think, the heart does not always deal in moral rectitude. Putting Grande on a pedestal helps no one, and the beatific, mature Eternal Sunshine brings her safely back down to earth.
This week Laura listened to
Sui Zhen – Sleepless
Written after the Melbourne musician endured not just the death of her mother but that of her newborn son, Sleepless is a stunningly lucid 13-minute epic about grief that brings to mind Jenny Hval and Let’s Eat Grandma in a surge of swooping, ecstatic electronics that build until they sound ready to take off.
• Alexis Petridis is away
