Ariana Grande's statement before parting with the audience will continue to resonate for a long time | Aharon Berlin
In 'petal', Ariana Grande turns toxic love, guilt, and disillusionment into 12 dizzying songs, sharpening once again that her power lies not only in her rare voice but also in her writing, acting, and ability to turn emotional cracks into music that won't let go of the ear.
It took me a long time to manage to sit down and write about 'petal', the new album by Ariana Grande. Every free moment I had, I would go aside, take out my headphones, and listen to the songs with a tear in the corner of my eye, so that every time I sat down to write about it, I couldn't find the words, I closed the computer, and put on the headphones.
The 12 songs that make up 'petal' constitute one of the artistic peaks in the career of a musician who has nothing left to prove. The album is one of the most distilled expressions of her inconceivable basket of talents and combines them into a cohesive creation that doesn't let go of the ear for a second. Treating Grande as one of the greatest vocalists of the generation is perhaps true, but it is light-years away from describing her multi-faceted artistic persona.
'petal' is an album of painful disillusionment. It deals with toxic love, a very popular topic these days, but from a focus on the desperate side that leads to it and from an understanding that 'taking responsibility' for it is elusive. The songs in it are careful not to point an accusing finger directly at a certain side and juggle the tangle of emotions out of compassion for the love that closes in from all directions.
Over the years, Grande has almost always been careful not to sing love to the end, to laugh at it and at herself, and above all – to sing about the endless paradoxes it contains. In the album, she manages to tell a story in a few words and write precise texts that do not fall into cliché or flatness. The public discourse around her does not sufficiently emphasize the fact that Grande is an excellent writer, one who can build her characters and those of others in one sentence and create emotional dizziness with a hint. 'petal' is a very clear album that deals with confusion, a precise sound that plays on the squeaks that love brings with it.
In 'Hate that i made you love me', she chooses to deal with one of the most charged topics of falling in love - obsession. In the song, Grande apologizes to a person who fell in love with her for the fact that, according to her, she caused him, or at least helped him, to feel this way, and sings in the chorus an unusual apology: 'sorry that I made me your type'. This is a very unusual angle on asymmetrical love and on the compassion she has for someone she caused, consciously or unconsciously, to fall in love with her.
This ambiguous tone runs throughout the album. 'no one fucks you like i do' she sings in the mighty 'like i do', in a sentence that throws the thought in countless directions. 'you'll never get over me' she sings in the following song. Grande does not allow the listener to take a side, managing to capture the cracks in the hard materials from which the emotions that stem from love are made.
Choosing not to shout
Throughout most of her career, Ariana Grande insisted on not singing loudly. It is enough to just open the Reels on social networks to know that this is not a limitation and that she can open the burners of her vocal cords more than any other singer. However, in her solo career, she chose to sing 'restrained', a move that often came with a sense of frustration from the listener's side. When she is a guest or in the tens of thousands of TikTok videos where she imitates divas, she has no problem reaching the highest possible note without effort. In the albums she released, however, those that made her the most played singer of the last decade, she was not in a hurry to use her voice excessively to impress.
Grande's cry was never in the front and always arrived at the right time to blend into harmony. Global indie music is full of the phenomenon of doubling voices and attempts by artists to perform different vocal roles in the same song. Often it sounds forced or as an attempt to cover up some vocal limitations. Grande is one of the only exceptions. In 'Dangerous Woman', the title track from the mighty album she released a decade ago, she keeps the singing in a relatively restrained register and only at the end pushes with all her might, while being careful to do so only in the second voice at the end of the song. This moment, which lasts a few seconds, causes chills precisely because it does not take over the song and is there to serve it, to release the tension it builds all the way through.
Grande may not shout in 'petal', but the doublings she does and the songs in which she sings two, three, or four completely different voices sound like a one-person show in a multi-character theater. The fact that it doesn't sound busy or boring doesn't just boil down to the fact that she is one of the greatest pop singers of this era, but rather touches on another talent she has - acting. The voices in her songs look more like a division of roles for a play - the first voice paves the way for the music, and the backup from behind comes in the second and third voices. The central singing is responsible for the confusion, and it is the layers that create the clear and contradictory thought. Thus, Grande allows the story of the album and the beautiful love scenes in it to go back and forth, to add more directions to the map she uses to find rest.
And the rest finally arrives. The closing song of 'petal' marks not only the end of the album but probably the end of a period, after the musician announced that she decided to take a break, with or without connection to the storm created by the beautiful clip she released for the title track. 'There's nowhere else and there is nobody that i'd rather be with' she sings and puts aside the reflection and conflict that accompanied her throughout the album. It only remains to hope that from this spectacular album, the black and white cover will remain, in which she closes her eyes with loose hair and a smile from ear to ear in a black and white picture, just as if she is predicting how I looked throughout the last week when the 12 petals of the new flower played in the headphones. Come back to us safely.
