Given a cursory listen, Ariana Grande’s current hit, the sly, slinky and strangely alluring “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” sounds like just another pop musical tale of romance gone sour — the kind of story that Grande is usually an expert at enlivening with her heavenly voice and chatty charisma.
But there is a complicating twist in the bridge, when Grande reveals that the “you” she has been addressing is not one person but many. “Is it really my fault — you all gave me your hearts of your own accord?” she sings, as the arrangement simplifies down to little more than an acoustic guitar, emphasizing her question all the more. That lyric suddenly casts the song in a different light, inviting a more interesting and sinister read: Is “Hate That I Made You Love Me” actually a barbed song about her own most obsessive fans?
Possibly. The 33-year-old pop star and actress sounds irritated with the invasive nature of fame throughout her steely new album, “Petal,” which trades her signature effervescence for something darker and more brooding. “All of my favorite stories end in some kind of catastrophe,” Grande sings on the title track, a chilly ode to self-reliance and her love-hate relationship with pop stardom that creeps along as if on tiptoe.
Two tracks later comes “Oh Well,” an up-tempo but forbidding kiss-off to false friends, whom Grande dismisses on the chorus in a biting falsetto: “Good luck on your way to hell.” After her movie-star turn playing Glinda the Good for two installments of the “Wicked” franchise, Grande makes it abundantly clear on “Petal” that she has popped that opalescent bubble and is now ready to lean into something grittier, spikier and perhaps even villainous.
The timing of this album is a bit odd. For one thing, it comes less than two years after Grande revealed that she was planning to put more of her creative energy into comedic acting and musical theater rather than pop stardom. “I’m always going to do pop stuff, I pinkie promise,” she told the hosts of the podcast “Las Culturistas.” “But I don’t think doing it at the rate I’ve been doing it for the past 10 years is where I see the next 10 years.”
So far at least, that prophecy has not come true. Grande is also releasing “Petal” while in the middle of a tour — her first in six years — to promote her previous album, the 2024 release “Eternal Sunshine.” (This November, she will star alongside Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller in the comedy “Focker-in-Law.”) That urgency suggests “Petal” is the sort of album a musician makes when she has something new or important to express, but these 12 tracks are disappointingly light on revelation.
Like “Eternal Sunshine,” Grande co-wrote and co-produced the material on “Petal” with Max Martin and his collaborator Ilya Salmanzadeh. (The credits specify that Grande wrote all of the lyrics herself.) That previous album was a work of sharp craftsmanship and tonal variety, but “Petal” feels murky and monochrome in comparison. As usual, Grande’s vocals are lovely and impressively arranged; she can still sing circles, squares and curlicues around most A-list pop stars. But the material here is mostly a morass of sluggish tempos that lacks the charisma and conviction of her best work. The middle of the album is a particular slog, only interrupted by the propulsive, bouncy energy of the penultimate track, “Bad Thing (Bunny Hop),” a dreamy, love-struck bop with obvious hit potential.
Grande sings on the title track of a “petal in the pavement,” a central image of defiant life springing from hostile environments — a less vivid version of Tupac Shakur’s rose that grew from concrete, perhaps. Consider the startling specificity Grande could command on a song like “Thank U, Next,” a winking 2018 hit that seemed to float benevolently above it all, even as she left no doubt as to which of her famous exes she was singing about: Sean, Ricky, Pete and Malcolm, mentioned by name. But a certain mistiness hovers about “Petal,” making the conflicts that are dragging Grande down and the enemies conspiring against her feel frustratingly vague.
Though their sounds and approaches are worlds apart, “Petal” shares some uncanny narrative similarities with an album released last week, Charli XCX’s “Music, Fashion, Film” — another up-to-the-minute missive from a 33-year-old musician working out whether she can creatively coexist as an actress and a pop star. Charli found a winning approach by writing about her ambivalence in candid and pointed detail, and in dissecting her own celebrity with the knowing self-awareness and witty intimacy that Grande employed on “Thank U, Next.”
By contrast, “Petal” unfurls at a remove. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the prickliness Grande gestures toward on “Hate That I Made You Love Me” and the other fatigued-with-fame songs on this album, but their imprecision offers more questions than answers. Does Ariana Grande still love being a pop star? Does she love it not? The petals could fall either way.
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