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.
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