Since the release of her last album, Eternal Sunshine, in 2024, Ariana Grande, already a multi-platform superstar, has exploded to even greater fame, via the Wicked film franchise. Given her peaking global profile, one might have expected the 33-year-old, ex-teen TV idol to come charging out with a maximalist pop whopper in the vein of, say, Lady Gaga’s Mayhem. But, no, she’s headed to contemplative waters.
Where Eternal Sunshine, a funky Dua Lipa-esque disco riff, celebrated pop, petal (sold to us in lowercase letters) has the smeary, slightly opiated-sounding production that the kids seem to love. Combined with Grande's airy, understated vocals, this means nothing is so sonically punchy it might accidentally overstimulate. By the same token, there’s also little that grabs.
At 12 songs in around 36 minutes, it might have been a commando raid, here and gone, in a buzz of bright fizz, but, instead, it recalls, at its best, Taylor Swift’s underrated gem, “The Fate of Ophelia”, wordy numbers about Grande being in over her head with the wrong guy. One of the album’s most more-ish songs exemplifies this, its lead single, “hate that i made you love me”, boasting goth-theatrical lyrics such as “Like flowers from a tomb while you decide who you are… like shadows on the moon, and it's all bad news”.
The production by Max Martin acolyte Ilya Salmanzadeh, and sometimes by the Swedish pop deity himself, is sometimes so imaginative it raises the bar, especially, when the songwriting has heft, as on spacey, cinematic slowie “freak”, “Bad Thing (Bunny Hop)” (the album’s only dancefloor banger), and, the title track, another contender for best song, a pulser that sludge-skanks along at a THC-zonked pace with Grande announcing that “all of my favourite stories end in some kind of catastrophe”.
Hilariously, Wikipedia describes petal’s songs as a combination of “shoegaze, garage rock, pop rock, pop and R&B”. They are not. But if more of them punched out of the woozy production, it might have been rather delicious. As it is, Ariana Grande’s latest is worth a cherrypick for the few ear-intriguing keepers.
Below: Watch the lyric video for the title track from Ariana Grande's petal album
