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7 hours ago
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‘Tell me who’s to blame?” Ariana Grande asks, exasperated, on the title track of her eighth album, Petal. “Is it the people or myself?” As bleary, fuzzed-up drums threaten to drown her out, this shadowy carousel-ride of a song cycles through more questions than answers. Does her success only make her need more of it? Can her new record of No 1 singles stave off heartbreak? Does Grande’s life shape her music, or does her music shape her life?
Moody and muted, Petal is a riposte to the glitz and sparkle of the pop star’s Oscar-nominated turn in Wicked and the theatre kid energy of her last album, 2024’s Eternal Sunshine. She describes this record as one of “unfiltered rage”, and there’s plenty Grande could be angry about: just this week she filed a lawsuit against hackers who allegedly stole and sold numerous unreleased songs.
Intrusive fans are raked over the coals on the icily aloof lead single Hate That I Made You Love Me – a huge global hit since its release in May – while whispery Oh Well casually dispatches “bad guys” (read: exes) to hell. Like I Do opens with panicky gasps, stylised as a vocal exercise, and ruminates on co-dependence with the press – along with a possible dig at years of clickbait headlines pedalling faux concern about her weight: “I’ve got shit to talk, keeps me well fed.”
The album’s central metaphor of a petal on the pavement – something delicate getting trampled underfoot – is mirrored in production that is unusually dark by Grande’s standards. Written and produced by Grande and longtime collaborator Ilya Salmanzadeh, Petal buries her soft, sparkling voice under bass, rattling percussion and a raft of crackling, distorted electronic textures. It sounds lonely: a haunted house of a pop record with Grande’s usual R&B vocal fireworks locked in the basement.
Dread-soaked opener Kiss Me is a crisis of faith, with Grande’s gleaming voice the only light in the dark as she demands, vampirically, for a lover to “bring her to life”. Water drips from the ceiling on Hate That I Made You Love Me, as if her chilly dismissal of her fans’ obsession was recorded in some kind of sewer.
Snatches of shuffling UKG percussion suggest that Kelela’s eerie fusion of club, R&B and alt-rock has replaced Mariah Carey’s glam on Grande’s mood board, but there’s still a shiny, theatrical bent to her new grunge. Sirens wee-woo melodramatically on Never Get Over Me, which threatens another ex over campy, villainous piano. In a similar vein, Big Feelings claims femme fatale status via generically stomping synths and a wide-eyed rendition of a line from Rizzo’s big ballad in Grease: “There are worse things that I could do.”
Through it all, Grande maintains a measured neutrality to her voice. Shelving the powerhouse vocal runs she’s famous for, she leans towards lacy, translucent harmonies and stacked layers (in the vein of her longtime inspiration Imogen Heap), which turn into ghostly cathedrals of sound. The closest we get to an old-school Ariana moment is on interlude Warning Signs, which escalates into a rare outburst: “I wish someone could hear me,” she cries, before the track cuts out.
Petal is an album of quiet, controlled, vetted anger; there’s no rush of blood to the head. Maybe it’s because Grande is rehashing familiar topics – it’s far from the first time she’s dissected fame, romance or self-worth in her music – that she sounds numb to it, tired of treading the same ground. Or maybe it’s because performing anger in public is a new challenge for her. While singing the title track live for the first time this week, she clenched her fists: Anger 101. But as she demanded those answers – from herself, from a sea of screaming fans and phone screens – her voice had real bite.
