In 2023, Ariana Grande gathered her team at Republic Records to preview Eternal Sunshine, the album she created when the Hollywood strikes brought production on Wicked to an abrupt stop. She cried while presenting the record, which she described as vulnerable and toying with the expectations often projected onto her. In a new Instagram video, Grande calls the group back into the same studio. “Surprise,” she said as she presented them with Petal, her upcoming eighth studio album out July 31.
Vulnerable was a fitting adjective for Eternal Sunshine, which found Grande in an introspective mindset as she unpacked her emotional state as well as her perception of love. When she detailed Petal, she landed on a sharper descriptor: “It’s a little feral.” Grande went on to explain that the record emerged from a part of herself that laid dormant for a while. “It’s definitely from a place where I have been maybe too shy or polite to tap into before,” she said. “This kind of just feels like, fuck it.”
Since announcing the album on April 28, Grande hasn’t offered many hints about where she may be heading sonically or conceptually on the record. At the time, she described it as “something that is full of life and growing through the cracks of something cold and hard and challenging.” It’s the exact phrase she used in the label meeting, though she spilled more afterwards, as the video reveals.
“It was kind of about breaking up with all different kinds of negative attachments — whether it’s my own monsters in my own head, external voices, things that no longer serve me,” she continued. “It was a writing experiment for me to use that as a template so that I could be talking about one thing and sharing something, and people could use it however they want and apply it to their own lives.”
In January, Grande joked that she would need “an extra brain and four more arms” to create another album to follow up Eternal Sunshine. At the time, she was still in GlindaLand while attending awards season events for Wicked: For Good. But now that she’s said goodbye to the character she had waited all her life to play, Grande is ready to get back to business.
