Ariana Grande is always at her best when she’s in a mood, and on Petal, she’s not holding back at all. “A little feral,” she calls this album, explaining, “I wrote from a place that I don’t usually, which was like an unfiltered rage.” She isn’t kidding. The catchiest pop tune here, “Oh Well,” is the one where she sings, “Good luck on your way to hell,” before dropping the killer punch line, “Don’t worry, ’cause you’ll keep getting breakup songs about you.”
That rage is all over Petal. But it suits her musically, because Ariana is always best — most herself — when she goes off the dome, talking her shit in DGAF mode. Even the album cover is part of her statement, wearing her hair down and loose — Ariana abandoning her ponytail is as iconic as George Michael setting fire to his leather jacket. For some of us, there’s no Ariana like Pissed-Off Ariana.
Her first taste of Petal was “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” which hit Number One, though it actually turns out to be one of the lesser tunes here. It serves as a thematic warning for the mood Ari’s in these days, sneering, “You studied my crown and borrowed my body.” But she aims her tough talk more at the culture than at any ex-friend or ex-lover. “Why you so hate to see women endure?” she demands. “Is it really my fault you all gave me your hearts of your own accord?”
Ariana rages against the tabloid rumor mill, which has been buzzing about her nonstop lately. But she’s always had a flair for using controversy as fuel for her art. That comes up all over this album, as she snarls lines like “Bitch, I’m practically drowning in my blessings” (“Petal”) or “All that shit-talk keeps me well fed” (“Like I Do”). She thrives on those bad vibes.
For her big comeback in 2024, she dropped Eternal Sunshine, a complex and masterful song cycle. But as soon as she released the album, she seemed to step back from pop stardom, almost as if she scared herself at how deep she went in those songs. Instead of promoting it, or doing interviews, she threw herself into her Hollywood blockbuster era with the Wicked movies. It almost felt like she felt safer in Oz than facing up to the heartbreak of Eternal Sunshine.
Going into Eternal Sunshine, she was in the headlines for her relationship with her co-star Ethan Slater, which inspired her splendidly nasty lead single “Yes And?,” the first Number One hit in history to ask “Why do you care so much whose dick I ride?” On Petal, she’s got similar scores to settle, after getting dragged back into the gossip columns. First, there was her quiet split with Slater, then her seemingly rekindled romance with her former dancer Ricky Alvarez, one of the I’m-so-grateful exes she already kissed goodbye in “Thank U Next,” back in 2018, when she sang, “Wrote some songs about Ricky/Now I listen and laugh.” On her current Eternal Sunshine tour, she’s been changing that second line to “And they still really slap,” or “I know he still got my back,” or “We always find our way back.”
Now that’s a power move. After all, she’s right — “Thank U Next” really does still slap, and so do the angriest songs here. “Oh Well” rides on snippets of drum-and-bass percussion and Eurodisco synth ripples, as Ariana struggles to rid her life of dysfunctional habits and toxic people, declaring, “My dead ends are gathered around dressed as friends.” But she’s making big changes, vowing, “The bad guys can go to hell.”
The songs on Petal are mostly moody midtempo electro-chill, brooding rather than banging. She co-wrote and co-produced the whole album with Ilya Salmanzadeh, the Swedish producer who’s had her back since “Problem” a dozen years ago, with Max Martin also collaborating on three of the tracks. The most clever production is “Freak,” with Eighties low-tech synth-pop buzz (very Yaz circa Upstairs at Eric’s), with digital finger snaps and her intricately layered harmonies.
In the fantastic tune, Ariana ponders the ironies of living in the limelight, turning her private romantic agonies into hit songs. “They say the artist needs tears to write more,” she sings, almost a decade after she gave us “No Tears Left to Cry.” Sometimes she wonders if the heartbreak she suffers is worth the music she gets out of it. She imagines a cynical audience scoffing that it doesn’t matter, “as long as she gets her ovation each night.”
But “Petal” hits home because she faces up to her dilemma — she craves the songs as much as she craves the romance itself, and she’s always in it to create more songs. “All of my favorite stories end in some kind of catastrophe,” she sings. “But I don’t need someone to save me/’Cause this music and I will never die.”
“Warning Signs (Interlude)” is like her version of Stevie Nicks’ “Silver Springs,” as she imagines her ex getting haunted by the sound of her voice coming out of the windows of a passing taxi. “My pain is music to you,” she sings with taunting mockery in her voice. “You don’t deserve me/You know you don’t, you never have/But I want you to feel me.” In “Kiss Me,” she quotes Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (“Buy the ticket, take the ride”) as she leaps headfirst into a new obsessive lust, pleading, “Kiss me like you know this is goodbye/Grab me like my life is on the line.”
She spends the final stretch of Petal singing about the renewal of starting over in a stronger relationship, with positive love songs such as “Nowhere, Nobody” or “Never Get Over Me,” where she sings, “The grass is way greener/Since I’ve been beneath ya.” “Big Feelings” is saturated in Nineties R&B, as she coos, “You could blame the stars or blame your sign/The sex is ’bout to make a grown man cry.” This romance is eccentrically spiritual (“I can become so aquatic”), yet breezy and light, as she sings lines like “Boy, you must have earned me historically,” and “Boy I love you therapeutically.”
Both Eternal Sunshine and the expanded Brighter Days Ahead were ornate and meticulously crafted, but the kick of Petal is that it’s much more loose and spontaneous. She’s shooting from the hip, both musically and emotionally. “It’s definitely from a place I’ve been maybe too shy or polite to tap into before,” Grande has said. “This kind of just feels like, ‘Fuck it.’” (Yeah right, Ariana — nothing says “shy” and “polite” like the louder-than-life pop diva who gave the world “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored.”) But that “fuck it” attitude comes through loud and clear on Petal — and that attitude brings out Ariana Grande at her best.
Drake onstage in Toronto last year
Everybody Likes Drake Again. That Means We’re Healing
Not to be dramatic or anything, but not too long ago, listening to people talk about Drake, you’d think he would never top the charts again. But here we are: With Iceman, he’s broken his own record, earning a 13th week atop Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart on Sept. 5, surpassing Take Care’s 12-week run more than a decade ago. The achievement comes after the great rap civil war of 2024, which was framed as everything from a referendum on Drake’s character as a human being to a cleansing of what popular radio host Ebro would describe, in February 2025, as “a sickness in the game.”
Again, not trying to be dramatic, but even if you were skeptical of the discourse circa 2024, it is a bit shocking to hear the public’s recent re-embrace of Drake. Consider how far the frenzy around the most salacious allegations on Kendrick Lamar‘s “Not Like Us” extended. There was Christopher Alvarez, a disabled journalist, being dragged into conspiracy theories. There was the woman from the resurfaced concert footage, now 31, having to publicly dispute the creepy significance strangers had assigned to an onstage kiss from when she was 17. Drake said in his lawsuit against UMG that the threats had forced him to pull his seven-year-old son out of school.
What now feels like the absurdity of the moment registered as something deathly serious at the time. By September 2024, Lamar was releasing the ominous “Watch the Party Die,” just days after his Super Bowl halftime performance was announced. Oh, also, a major talking point in American culture a year and a half ago was whether one of the biggest superstars in the world would be publicly branded a pedophile during the Super Bowl.
In what world would any celebrity recover from that?
Except, with time, the online frenzy surrounding the Drake and Lamar feud reads more like a mass-psychosis event than a cultural reckoning. The music, oddly enough, often seemed secondary to the certainty of everyone discussing it. “Not Like Us” was a veritable hit, absolutely. But its cultural dominance became bound up in a widespread vilification of Drake that curdled online, where the most damning interpretation of anything could quickly become the accepted one. For a while, even putting on a Drake song could feel like something you had to explain, as if listening amounted to taking a position on the allegations.
That this all happened in 2024 is meaningful. This was right in the peak of Elon Musk’s reconstruction of Twitter, privileging rage bait and engagement tactics that helped misinformation disseminate like fact. It was also the beginning of AI tools becoming sophisticated enough to produce convincing-sounding tracks. Even before Drake released his first response, “Push Ups,” AI-generated response tracks were circulating across social media. And so, in many ways, the well of public opinion was already poisoned.
Listeners’ recent embrace of Drake feels settled in a broader cultural shift brewing since 2024. The beef, in hindsight, feels like a dying vestige of whatever people want to call “Woke 1.0”: a particular faith that exposing the right person could amount to a cultural transformation. For a moment, defeating Drake seemed to promise something about the future of hip-hop, about who would belong in it and what it would tolerate.
There were obvious holes in the argument, namely who exactly these arbiters of culture were and why they were uniquely qualified to speak for the entirety of Black people, questions that Drake pokes at on “Ran to Atlanta” from Iceman. Still, these were never even supposed to be binding philosophical truths in the first place. To hear levelheaded commentators discuss it, this was all simply entertainment — two of the genre’s greats duking it out. Even one of the beef’s catalysts, Metro Boomin, echoed the sentiment, lamenting how online fans had turned the battle into something sinister. Hell, even Jay-Z said something similar before himself tossing a few jabs at Drizzy in a freestyle at the Roots Picnic this year. But the artists themselves supplied the allegations. The ability to raise those stakes and then retreat into “simply entertainment” was part of the dynamic, too.
Even so, how it all devolved into a pseudocultural reckoning says more about the environment fans exist in today than it does about either Drake or Lamar. In the years around the beef, shocking revelations about Diddy as well as the global elite’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have become folded into the background, alongside a sense that accountability remains selective. This atmosphere of collective powerlessness offers one explanation for the conspiratorial thinking at the heart of Lamar versus Drake. A frustration with an increasingly degraded world and dwindling resources to change it means outrage can mobilize an enormous number of people very quickly, with little holding them together once the moment passes.
The language of exploitation and cultural extraction gave the battle a purpose that seemed to extend well beyond either rapper. But even if you took the least charitable opinion imaginable of our Canadian hitmaker, what was supposed to happen after Drake was defeated? The industry whose supposed wickedness Drake allegedly embodied carried on selling the spectacle itself.
What everyone was caught up in was an appetite with a longer history than the social media platforms now feeding it. Lance Oppenheim’s new film, Primetime, returns to Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator, a television format that made public humiliation feel like a public service. The connection is in the experience offered to the audience. The viewer could enjoy the confrontation with the reassuring sense that watching served some larger good. Never mind if anything that was unfolding on screen amounted to justice.
In the historian Anton Jäger’s book-length essay Hyperpolitics, published earlier this year in English, he describes how the past decade’s surge of political feeling has coincided with a continuing withdrawal from communal life. More isolated digital environments can fuel extraordinary mobilization without the actual community organizations that might turn it into something tangible. Negating Drake, then, became a gesture in itself. A means of signaling a broader dissatisfaction with the direction of hip-hop culture. Where the problems extend to technology and the demoralizing margins of streaming music, for a while it felt good for people to just wrap it all up in one word: Drake.
But on Iceman, it’s hard to take the idea of Drake as an evil force within hip-hop very seriously, even as he himself makes an effort to lean into the role of the villain. Drake’s music is most potent when it’s aimed at the masses, even if he swears his nice-guy days are over. This is the Degrassi kid turned global superstar rivaling Taylor Swift, after all.
Now, with Fear of Missing Out, Drake’s cryptically announced project slated for release this week, we’ve entered a second kind of Drake Renaissance. However delusional it seems, there was a moment when it felt somehow wrong to play Drake. His return to the top of the charts suggests a good deal of people were eager to get back to listening.