- Babydoll/Republic/UMG
- 2026
I was worried about this one. On her endless, overlapping press tours to promote the Wicked movies, Ariana Grande seemed eager to leave pop-music royalty behind, to throw herself into the kind of theater-kid acting roles that the big-budget Broadway adaptations offered her. She now looks, talks, and moves like a completely different person than the sparkling, self-aware diva who conquered the pop landscape and bent it to her will in the first place. It was a bit surprising when Grande announced both an arena tour and an album earlier this year, and it came with a weird streak of noblesse oblige, as if she simply deigned to stop by the pop-music party on her way to the Focker-In-Law premiere. (That movie looks quite bad, by the way.)
Lead single "hate that i made you love me" was the only song that Grande shared before the album came out today, and it didn't exactly dispel any fears. Musically, the track is so subdued that it's barely even there, burying its keyboard-preset chug and gentle harmonies under aggressively tasteful studio craft. Lyrically, it was hard to interpret the song as anything other than a fuck-you to the fans whose parasocial relationships had evidently gotten out of hand: "Is it really my fault you gave me all your hearts of your own accord? I really don't think so." In the abstract, it's intriguing to see an A-list pop queen turning on her stan army. In practice, the gesture feels muddled and passive-aggressive, just as it did when Taylor Swift pulled the same moves on The Tortured Poets Department. "hate that i made you love me" isn't a flop by most artists' standards — it's been parked in the top five since it came out — but it's the first Ariana Grande lead single in years that didn't immediately catapult to cultural omnipresence. It was not a good sign.
Once upon a time, Grande managed that parasocial-relationship situation with an effortless playfulness that none of her peers could match. She'd go through an ultra-public breakup, and then she'd respond with something like "thank u, next," a knowing and tossed-off meta-commentary that still worked as a fun, flirty pop song. Maybe you can only maintain that grounded distance for so long before you wish everyone would just get the fuck out of your business forever. Grande just turned 33, and she has been way too famous for her entire adult life. It must be exhausting. But then why make another album if you want out of that whole system? Why not simply continue accepting acting roles in studio slop until the Arianators all get the message?
petal, the album that finally arrived today, isn't the self-righteously bitter trainwreck that I feared, but it does function as an anti-pop move on Grande's part, an intentional downsizing. My immediate takeaway from petal is that Grande would really like to make a Kelela record. It's so quiet. Especially on headphones, you can hear the big-budget depth of the production — the artfully smeared synth buzzes, the carefully programmed drums, the murmuring layers of Grande's stacked harmonies. The sonic cohesion of petal is impressive, as if Grande consciously decided to turn the retro-'80s neon-noir sound of her occasional duet partner the Weeknd into something halfway to ambient. The result is a lot of pretty, pleasant music that floats off into the ether, which does not exactly play to Ariana Grande's pop-star strengths.
Grande recorded all of petal with trusted collaborator ILYA, the Swedish-Iranian Max Martin protege who's been steadily working with her since "Problem" in 2014. Martin himself shows up to co-write three tracks, including "hate that i made you love me." You can kind of tell that Grande works from the Max Martin playbook all through petal. The melodies are structurally sound, and Grande remains willing to warp her syntax so that her lyrics will fit the meter that they need to fit. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these choruses really sneak up on me and embed themselves in my consciousness, the way Grande did with "we can't be friends," the Robyn-pastiche megahit from her last album, 2024's eternal sunshine. But it's like she's trying to hide those choruses, to make sure her new songs don't hit with the euphoric fizz of her past bangers.
As a pure singer, Ariana Grande is basically unmatched in her peer group. She can do things that her competition simply cannot. On petal, she downplays her abilities, delivering everything in the same half-asleep whisper-purr and building her own stacked vocal layers into the fabric of every song. It still comes off as something that none of her peers could do; I really like little touches like the sighed operatic scales that merge with the rumbling quasi-trap beat of "like i do." But Grande has turned her titanic voice into an insular instrument, which she reinforces by swallowing most of her words to the point where you might need a lyric sheet to follow along. Maybe that's a good thing.
On petal, Grande does not employ the teams of co-writers that worked on so many of her past hits. Victoria Monét does not get involved. Instead, Grande essentially writes all her own words now, and a lot of her lyrics are along the lines of "hate that i made you love me" — leave-me-alone superstar blues phrased with just enough plausible deniability that you could choose to interpret them as kiss-offs to an ex: "I'm making cents off of your nonsense/ All that shit-talk keeps me well-fed/ Through thick and thin, you're so locked in/ You hate to love me," "I don't have to try to be responsible for things that just aren't mine," "It's bye, this time for real."
I can't relate. Maybe that's the issue. Maybe Grande has lived her entire life under such a microscope that almost nobody can relate and she's tired of all those prying eyes, speculating about her weight or her future plans or her love life. (The update there: Grande is no longer involved with her Wicked co-star Ethan Slater, the guy who played Spongebob Squarepants on Broadway, and now she's apparently back with her former backup dancer Ricky Alvarez, one of the exes she namechecked on "thank u, next.") Beyond the public-life material on petal, Grande sings a lot about love and sex, though she doesn't bring quite the same snap to lines like "pussy so sweet, a tear fell from his eye." She also goes awfully hard on a running metaphor about flowers growing on a tombstone, which isn't going to win her any literary prizes.
Still, the album slides by with a smooth sense of assurance. It doesn't waste your time. Grande and ILYA bring tons of subtle musical ideas to these tracks — delicate UK garage skitter-pulses on "oh well," wispy synth-rock guitars on "freak," Imogen Heap-style robo-harmonies on "nowhere, nobody." "bad thing (bunny hop)" sounds like someone hit "Blinding Lights" with a shrinking ray. The loping strut of "big feelings" evokes '90s R&B. Grande's choruses are all sharply honed, even if she's not putting the same mustard on them anymore. And while petal is easily Grande's most indulgent album, it's an easy listen, its 12 songs sliding past in just over half an hour. Her peers could learn a lot from that concision.
Whatever direction Grande's career might take in the future, petal feels like a transitional work. I didn't like Wicked at all, but Grande is really good in it, and she earned her Oscar nomination. The loopy charisma that she showcased in so many SNL skits translates just fine to the big screen, so maybe she'll transition to full-time movie stardom and petal will work as a bittersweet farewell to the institution of pop stardom. Or maybe Grande is trying to scale her music back, to make full-length art-piece records that don't have the cultural centrality of the stuff that she made a decade ago, and petal is simply a step on a journey that started with Positions and eternal sunshine.
If Grande really doesn't care about making bangers anymore, than this kind of meticulously crafted backup music isn't a bad way to go. But lots of people can make meticulously crafted background music, and only a few can make true bangers. petal isn't the disaster that I feared, but it's nowhere near great. Coming from someone who can be great, who has been great, it can't help but disappoint.
petal is out now on Babydoll/Republic/UMG.
