The pop star’s second album in six months rewrites mushy cliché with a sharp personal edge.
Courtesy of Ariana Grande, here’s a new breakup phrase to fear: “Don’t want you in my bloodline.” Yes, the 25-year-old singer has thought ahead to the far-off century when she is but a leaf on Ancestry.com. She has determined the desired height and hair-shininess of the future influencers who will call her nonna. Your genome, sir, has been sequenced and found wanting. Take your trash DNA and go.
What a reversal. Grande’s bubblegum used to peddle true love and triumph, or it offered escape: Unplug your brain, take home a stranger, surrender to the stair machine. In the singer’s brief but seismically active career—quakes of news, aftershocks of hits—child-star rituals (like discovering sex) and awful realities (like terrorism) have been polished into tales of uplift. The starkly beautiful 2018 hit “No Tears Left to Cry” could well have been her last word on trauma. But only six months after the confetti-strewn therapy session of Sweetener, a fresh Grande album tends to new wounds while insisting, per one chorus, “Fuck a fake smile.” Thank U, Next, brittle and biting, could be called February: The Album .
Grande’s post- Sweetener life has been tough, with an ex’s fatal overdose and a kiss-and-breakup saga that could hardly have been more public. As important, though, has been her realization about why the imperial-diva business model of the Katy Perry class faltered in recent years. “It’s just like, ‘Bruh, I just want to fucking talk to my fans and sing and write music and drop it the way these boys do,’” she told Billboard, contrasting her cumbersome promotional machine against the single-a-minute flexibility of Soundcloud rap.
