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On the surface, Ariana Grande’s “Petal” is a sister album to its predecessor, 2024’s “Eternal Sunshine”— it was made with the same two collaborators, Ilya Salmanzadeh and Max Martin, and it also was entirely written,
performed and produced by the three of them. Usually, that formula means a chapter two: more of the same but different.
Not this time. This sister is darker, moodier and a lot more blunt than “Sunshine,” and her emotions are more volatile, less heartbroken, and much less internalized. It’s a different Ariana, musically and especially lyrically.
Grande braced her fans for a change in a widely circulated interview earlier this week. “I think [fans] will feel familiarity and comfort in it,” she said of the album. “Yet at the same time it’s very experimental and different for me, and also I wrote from a place that I don’t usually, which is unfiltered rage,” she laughed. “I usually am too shy to tap into that, and I think this time I didn’t filter as much as I usually do.”
“This is rage?,” some may think at first listen, because it’s still a pop album, even though it moves into weirder territory musically than she has in the past. And let’s be real: With her pretty, pristine soprano, it’s hard to imagine what an Angry Ari (“AngRI”?) would sound like. But lurking below the shiny surface of many of the songs are lyrics like:
“Just know that I will find my way from you like flowers from a tomb”; “All of my favorite stories end in some kind of catastrophe”; “I’m not a victim, bitch, I’m practically drowning in my blessings”; “Good luck on your way to hell.” Likewise, the NSFW lyrics of her recent albums moves into a whole new realm: “Pussy so sweet a tear fell from his eye”; “This sex is bout to make a grown man cry”; “The grass is way greener since I been beneath ya”; and if those were too subtle, “No one fucks you like I do.”
And for good measure, there’s a mission statement: “Keep my heels tall, my ego small, but I’m still Grande.”
The heartbroken but resilient Grande from the last album is nowhere in sight — with one exception, these songs are about vengeance or sex, and about whom is bound to be the subject of endless online chatter.
The album’s lead single, “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” is a solid introduction to the sound of the album’s more experimental tracks: It’s beautiful but odd, with a crinkling synthesizer hook over a spare beat, creating an haunting setting for her lush, multitracked vocals; her growth as a melodicist is on full display in the mellifluous, multisyllabic middle section.
As she promised, there are familiar-sounding songs and moments (“Kiss Me,” “Freak”), but there’s also music that would be more expected from FKA Twigs or even the Weeknd — Ilya executive-produced the album with Grande (Martin contributes to just three songs), so his more-adventurous inclinations have come to the fore. “Like I Do,” probably the album’s darkest song musically, is based around the lovely eight-note wordless figure she sings at the beginning, but soon gives way to an ominous, hulking rhythm musical track; several songs are built around Ilya’s trademark malfunctioning-computer synth lines. The hard-hitting title track pairs a busy, complex melody with a thudding Portishead rhythm; it’s like two different songs playing in synch.
But even relatively straightforward songs don’t sound like anything she’s done before. “Never Get Over Me” has an icy funk groove with a silky soulful vocal — and, far off in the distance, that psycho siren-like sound from “Kill Bill” (thematic link!) whenever Beatrix Kiddo is about to act out her unfiltered rage. “Bad Thing (Bunny Hop)” is a fast, new wave-esque track with a flash of “Blinding Lights”; “Big Feelings” has a sultriness that we have rarely heard from her in the past.
The one exception is the closing track and prettiest song, the ballad “Nowhere, Nobody,” driven by a heavily echoed guitar and a percolating rhythm track, a showcase for Grande’s lush, layered vocals, which bring back the wistfulness of “Eternal Sunshine.” It, and the album, end on an English-teacher-enraging note by quite deliberately finishing with a preposition: “There’s nowhere else and there is nobody else/ that I’d rather be … with.”
“Petal” is not an easy or obvious career move — it’s probably the biggest musical departure of her career, but it’s also her most musically and lyrically accomplished album. She continues to grow as a virtuoso singer and vocal arranger, soaring to the top of her range with ease, but also showing nuance in her emotion as well as the kind of innovation she showed on the elaborate singing-along-with-herself loops featured on the “Sunshine” tour. Eight albums into her discography, Ariana Grande continues to surprise.
