On 19 April, Ariana Grande teased fans with a snippet of her first new music to be released since a suicide bomber killed 22 people at her concert in Manchester last May. It sounded, from those 30 seconds, as though No Tears Left to Cry might be a ballad, with the 24-year-old turning her pliant vocal range to gospel. It would have made for an appropriate, traditional tribute, if a surprising one considering her previous responses to the tragedy.
Despite professional prude Piers Morgan bleating after the attack that she wasn’t demonstrating her grief in the proper way, Grande and manager Scooter Braun swiftly organised One Love Manchester, a vast benefit concert that pulled in performances from artists including Justin Bieber, Liam Gallagher, Coldplay, Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus. It was one of the most joyful, defiant celebrations of pop and the communities it inspires that has ever been staged – so it makes sense that No Tears takes exactly the same attitude.
It turns out that the stately sample teased on Thursday was a feint. “Ain’t got no tears left to cry,” Grande sings in classic diva style, before switching to a more playful cadence: “So I’m pickin’ it up, pickin’ it up / I’m lovin’, I’m livin’, I’m pickin’ it up.”
Heralded by shuffling drums that briefly evoke Jamie xx’s Gosh, the Max Martin production turns into a vibrant celebration of dancing against the odds filled with with knowing nods to pop history: those lush, velveteen synth vamps in the house-inspired verses sound quite a bit like Madonna’s Vogue, the ultimate dancefloor-as-sanctuary banger, and the gospel/pop bait-and-switch that recurs in the chorus similarly brings to mind Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer’s 1979 hit No More Tears (Enough Is Enough). It’s an instant earworm – and gratifying, too, to see Grande tackle the single alone rather than with a guest, as she often does.
While No Tears is broad enough to enter the canon of timeless sad songs, it contains some satisfyingly specific lyrical barbs. “Don’t matter how, what, where, who tries it / We’re out here vibing,” Grande sings, a line evidently aimed at anyone who thinks such an attack would make people abandon the pursuit of pleasure. She goes further: “We’re way too fly to partake in all this hate,” she sings, maybe implicating opportunists who used the attack to entrench division. And most satisfyingly of all: “Can’t stop, so shut your mouth,” a recurring kiss-off aimed in the direction of anyone who would judge her – or her fans – for choosing to live, rather than mourn.
None of which should be surprising, really, given how Grande seized control of her post-Nickelodeon career, achieved A-list pop stardom without kowtowing to reigning EDM trends, and emerged as a bold voice on feminism and gender double standards. Tradition has never been her style.
