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\n Her art is in acrimonious conversation with its spectators.
\n Photo: Ariana Grande via YouTube\n <\/p>\n
Over the weekend, just two days after the release of Ariana Grande\u2019s eighth album, Petal, a representative announced to People<\/a> that Grande would be \u201ctaking a step back from visibility\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s title track<\/a>, released Friday afternoon. Ariana Grande\u2019s art is in acrimonious conversation with its spectators.<\/p>\n Caught between a defensive line of fans, an array of worried and\/or triggered observers, and people dressing their gleeful critiques of a woman\u2019s body in the guise of concern, Grande interjects some of the slowest, somberest music of her career. The question of whether Petal\u2019s tepid lead single, \u201cHate That I Made You Love Me<\/a>,\u201d is about her ex, Wicked\u2019s 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\u2019t know as well as they think they do. This album is low on the toe-tapping immediacy of \u201cYes, And?\u201d and the vocal theatrics of \u201cDon\u2019t Wanna Break Up Again\u201d 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201980s adult contemporary and \u201990s Mariah Carey<\/a> and Whitney Houston<\/a> remixes. But Petal is Dangerous Woman\u2019s<\/a> 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\u2019s 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\u2019re not tuned in to the words, might evoke pain.<\/p>\n \u201cBig Feelings,\u201d produced with Salmanzadeh, is a gloomier take on the pop-funk thump of Martin staples like Britney Spears\u2019s \u201c\u2026 Baby One More Time\u201d where Grande juggles jokes about girth and thinly veiled threats: \u201cI think I give him big feelings \u2026 There are worse things that I could do.\u201d \u201cStay\u201d 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 \u201cI just wanna stay \u2026 this \u2026 time.\u201d \u201cOh Well,\u201d the requisite electronic-music moment, centers the running theme of the album: She\u2019s not necessarily having a great time but is open to things turning around. On that track, Grande is wounded and exhausted \u2014 \u201cI play all the parts that I\u2019m supposed to, right? \/ And I just throw a Band-Aid on my whole damn life\u201d \u2014 but nevertheless reminds herself of her blessings.<\/p>\n Petal grouses about the obligations of a public figure as though it\u2019s dressing down a lover. Grande is sick of performing perfection, and \u201cLike I Do\u201d seethes about being consumed like a product (\u201cExtra, extra \/ Buy one, take me\u201d), while the psych-pop jam \u201cFreak\u201d expresses disinterest in being the object of others\u2019 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\u2019t buy the Old Hollywood Grande of the early 2020s; her headlines punctured the wholesome fa\u00e7ade. The Good Witch was \u201cnot a girl\u2019s girl,\u201d Slater\u2019s ex-wife proclaimed<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The title of the album is instructive. Grande is notably not calling herself a rose in the concrete, as other artists<\/a> 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\u2019s \u201ctired of painting endless pictures of a life that isn\u2019t mine.\u201d There\u2019s no shape or skill that pleases the peanut gallery, so she kills them with a chainsaw.<\/p>\n \u201cPetal\u201d makes us linger in the disapproval for the star\u2019s 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<\/a>, and it suggests that life on the business end of the public\u2019s nonstop conjecture must feel the same year on year \u2014 like never getting free of unsolicited advice from strangers on how to look, dress, speak, and even eat. The \u201cPetal\u201d video is difficult to watch; it\u2019s 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 \u201ccould lose a few lbs.\u201d <\/strong>There\u2019s an unspoken message of \u201cFuck off and die\u201d in this song for people who believe they\u2019ve diagnosed Grande with all sorts of medical and mental-health crises. It sharpens the album\u2019s annoyances to a point, setting up shop right in the middle of the chilling summerlong discourse.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 the \u201cPetal\u201d video received a community note on Instagram directing people with eating disorders to a hotline \u2014 and wants it known they\u2019ve 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\u2019s becoming clear that the pressure is untenable.<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the August 10, 2026, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n