Who pissed off Ariana Grande? Well, who didn’t?
On her new album, “Petal,” the pop superstar opens the spigot on what she’s described as an “unfiltered rage” to blast any number of feckless exes, a prying public obsessed with her body and her personal life — and not least herself for allowing anyone the power to hurt her in the first place.
“Tell me who’s to blame — is it the people or myself?” she wonders against the icy synth stabs of the title track.
Her answer, delivered as a sneering little aside: “Yeah.”
“Petal” marks a dramatic shift from Grande’s previous LP, 2024’s “Eternal Sunshine,” a tender and melancholy electro-pop collection that laid out a kind of emotional philosophy of heartbreak. She recorded the new album with the same team — the hit-making writer-producers Ilya Salmanzadeh and Max Martin — but here they go for a murkier, more percussive sound to match Grande’s dark mood.
Tolling electric guitar accompanies her in “Freak” as she muses on “all of the life I’ve been denied,” while “Oh Well” puts a jittery U.K. garage beat under her sneering farewell to an unnamed antagonist: “Good luck on your way to hell.” In “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 when Grande released it as “Petal’s” lead single, she sings, “I’ve held your projections when you’ve felt so insecure,” over a trudging groove that moves like a funeral march.
These downcast observations arrive at what would seem to be a professional high point for Grande, who recently wrapped her extended stay in the “Wicked”-verse and who’s in the middle of a tour that’s drawn adoring fans to arenas across the country.
But perhaps that’s the point: Almost every song on “Petal” can be interpreted two ways — as a story about a broken relationship between two people or as a tale about the toxic connection between an idol and her audience. (More than once did this record make me think about Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department.”)
“My pain is music — do you hear me everywhere?” Grande asks in “Warning Signs (Interlude),” which climaxes with a pithy diagnosis of pop stardom in the parasocial age: “You don’t deserve me / You know you don’t, you never have / But I want you to feel me / I wish someone could hear me.”
Complaints about celebrity can be pretty tedious, of course; sometimes it feels as though famous pop singers have forgotten how to write about anything other than life in the social-media fishbowl.
Yet “Petal” gets some creative traction from how Grande chooses to use her voice; instead of belting, she rarely rises above a whisper, which gives a spooky, slightly creepy quality to her thoughts on being endlessly scrutinized. The airiness of her singing provides some comedy too in a hard-edged song such as “Like I Do,” where after noting that “all that s— talk keeps me well-fed,” she tells whoever needs to hear it, “No one f— you like I do.”
Having gotten all this off her chest, Grande finishes the album by allowing in some light: Over a zippy new wave arrangement, “Bad Thing (Bunny Hop)” ponders the renewing energy of a fresh romance — or maybe a rekindled old one — while the glistening “Nowhere, Nobody” has her taking deep breaths with a lover she’s convinced might finally give her what she needs.
“Convinced” is probably the wrong word.
“Hard to believe in a perfect ending,” she admits, “But that’s all right.”
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