Her art is in acrimonious conversation with its spectators.
Photo: Ariana Grande via YouTube

Over the weekend, just two days after the release of Ariana Grande’s eighth album, Petal, a representative announced to People that Grande would be “taking a step back from visibility” after her Eternal Sunshine tour ends in September. She had been slated to promote Focker-in-Law in the fall, then join a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George next year. The latter engagement is off. This was the first inkling that anything was daunting about her schedule, which has barely let up since the cycle for Jon M. Chu’s Wicked adaptation, in which Grande and Cynthia Erivo seemed to be Method acting in interviews as their codependent mystic characters. But discussion about the singer and actor all this time has focused on her mental and physical well-being. Speculation about weight loss in the Wicked cast followed Grande onto the tour and now animates the timing of her break; the announcement was preceded by a chorus of alarm about her appearance in the music video for Petal’s title track, released Friday afternoon. Ariana Grande’s art is in acrimonious conversation with its spectators.

Caught between a defensive line of fans, an array of worried and/or triggered observers, and people dressing their gleeful critiques of a woman’s body in the guise of concern, Grande interjects some of the slowest, somberest music of her career. The question of whether Petal’s tepid lead single, “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” is about her ex, Wicked’s Ethan Slater, or her prying audience lingers over the rest of Petal, which meditates on people adoring or despising the idea of someone they don’t know as well as they think they do. This album is low on the toe-tapping immediacy of “Yes, And?” and the vocal theatrics of “Don’t Wanna Break Up Again” but serves grit and angst that feel vital and honest. It all seems informed by the darkest queries surrounding this period in her life without directly getting into any of them. Petal is a solid body of work that doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It feels like it exists because Grande had a lot to say rather than just an advantageous stretch of months available to whisk into the studio with her team.

Eternal Sunshine (2024) brought Grande up to speed with her time-traveling, chart-topping peers, balancing modern dance-pop and R&B against nods to ’80s adult contemporary and ’90s Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston remixes. But Petal is Dangerous Woman’s daughter, rife with slow, soulful grooves that, this time around, are as ominous as they are sensual. Reconnecting with Sunshine co-producers Ilya Salmanzadeh and (to a lesser extent) Max Martin, Grande sings of blowing through breakups and make-ups and enduring mounting exhaustion with mass notoriety while the music swirls patiently and frequently angrily underneath. Grande’s downcast vocal delivery greets guitar-based tracks on which even her expressions of lust can present as glum sequences of notes or clusters of chords that, if you’re not tuned in to the words, might evoke pain.

“Big Feelings,” produced with Salmanzadeh, is a gloomier take on the pop-funk thump of Martin staples like Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time” where Grande juggles jokes about girth and thinly veiled threats: “I think I give him big feelings … There are worse things that I could do.” “Stay” seems like a textbook pure pop declaration of romantic interest, but the chorus hints at past failures through its lyrics and cadence, especially hanging on the words at the end of the line “I just wanna stay … this … time.” “Oh Well,” the requisite electronic-music moment, centers the running theme of the album: She’s not necessarily having a great time but is open to things turning around. On that track, Grande is wounded and exhausted — “I play all the parts that I’m supposed to, right? / And I just throw a Band-Aid on my whole damn life” — but nevertheless reminds herself of her blessings.

Petal grouses about the obligations of a public figure as though it’s dressing down a lover. Grande is sick of performing perfection, and “Like I Do” seethes about being consumed like a product (“Extra, extra / Buy one, take me”), while the psych-pop jam “Freak” expresses disinterest in being the object of others’ fantasies. The album is a luridly frank and uncompromising assessment of her station as a former Nickelodeon star who demolished her squeaky-clean image in a protracted, noticeably tan 2010s bad-girl arc but squished back into the chipper veneer when her theater-kid dream job came knocking with Wicked. People didn’t buy the Old Hollywood Grande of the early 2020s; her headlines punctured the wholesome façade. The Good Witch was “not a girl’s girl,” Slater’s ex-wife proclaimed.

The title of the album is instructive. Grande is notably not calling herself a rose in the concrete, as other artists have done to denote vibrancy contrasted with unliving stone and growth despite obstacles. She views herself as a petal, tasked with attracting pollinating agents, whose destiny is to vividly woo, to fall, and to wither. Grande dangles the image of a fleeting, imperiled leaf over a record that stews about people having turned on her, as if to say a woman in the spotlight has about as much time in the good graces of the public as a flower does on the sidewalk. The video for the title track sees Grande nervously walking past one as her character, aspiring actress Pepper, is on the way to audition for a bunch of ghoulish men. They do not enjoy a burlesque routine; they do not approve when she returns with noticeably larger breasts while deadpanning that she’s “tired of painting endless pictures of a life that isn’t mine.” There’s no shape or skill that pleases the peanut gallery, so she kills them with a chainsaw.

“Petal” makes us linger in the disapproval for the star’s current body and the bustier ideal people point to when they express concern that she is suffering very publicly from an eating disorder. This play is about us, and it suggests that life on the business end of the public’s nonstop conjecture must feel the same year on year — like never getting free of unsolicited advice from strangers on how to look, dress, speak, and even eat. The “Petal” video is difficult to watch; it’s a swift study of everything people object to about her appearance now that asks us to take stock of her evolution and watch her read a suggestion that she “could lose a few lbs.” There’s an unspoken message of “Fuck off and die” in this song for people who believe they’ve diagnosed Grande with all sorts of medical and mental-health crises. It sharpens the album’s annoyances to a point, setting up shop right in the middle of the chilling summerlong discourse.

Grande wants us to see her handling business and being comfortable in the body some of her audience feels has left her too winded to hit her eight counts and notes. She understands people are freaking out about how thin she is — the “Petal” video received a community note on Instagram directing people with eating disorders to a hotline — and wants it known they’ve never had a right to an opinion on her body nor maintained consistent expectations. Here is a woman ostensibly at the top of her game in two fields nevertheless feeling shot down and worn out. The feeling that it taxes her to make a living this way has rarely been as pronounced. Petal vents about the plight of the mass entertainer who is forever observed and critiqued. It’s becoming clear that the pressure is untenable.

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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the August 10, 2026, issue of
New York Magazine.

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