As Ariana Grande rounded out the final year of her charmed and tumultuous 20s, it would have been more than enough for her to simply reflect on the previous decade. Taken together, the whole supercut of her meteoric rise, milestone achievements, high-profile relationships, confrontations with angels and demons, and widely heralded moments of grace under fire, would have provided Grande with more than enough material for a capstone album. But as her Saturn returned, and the much-referenced astrological event came to pass, Grande was forced to face down some of her most personally challenging news cycles to date. Since 2020’s Positions, Grande married discreetly and divorced publicly, began production on the movie adaptation of the musical Wicked, and sparked a new romance (and almost immediate controversy) with her co-star, Ethan Slater, Broadway’s very own Spongebob Squarepants.
Grande’s career has been presented to us as a chain of successive breakthroughs, whether making a full-throated bid for pop glory (My Everything), persevering through almost unthinkable degrees of heartbreak (Sweetener), or fully embracing her adult sensuality (Positions). Like Taylor Swift, the singer has been able to maintain a mass following by time-stamping each era with different boyfriends, makeovers, and most crucially: lending the decisive final word to all the back-biting and petty gossip. On eternal sunshine, Grande takes a widely publicized moment of personal upheaval and chisels it into the a-ha! moment of her discography. Loosely billed as a “concept record” about her divorce and the personal revelations her Saturn return inspired, sunshine is a slightly scattered, but emotionally generous collection of music that cycles compassionately through the collapse of one relationship and into the hopeful beginning of another.
Drawing inspiration from the 2004 Michel Gondry film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—a surreal romantic comedy in which people can elect to have unwanted memories erased as a form of therapy—Grande concerns herself with the residual feelings and tortured thoughts that linger long after a breakup. Over an understated guitar strum and faux-romantic strings on “intro (end of the world)”, she introduces the record’s central theme by immediately ripping into a series of blunt, rapid-fire questions: “How can I tell if I’m in the right relationship?/Aren’t you really supposed to know that shit?/Feel it in your bones and own that shit?” She announces her breakup moments later with the Studio 54 strut of “bye,” but the song’s triumphant kiss-off almost immediately doubles back on itself with dislodged memories, delayed anguish, and brutal recriminations on the following tracks.
As a “concept record,” eternal sunshine isn’t nearly as cohesive of a divorce record as, say, Adele’s 30, but Grande smuggles in some interesting threads regardless. The meta-narrative of the public and media as her fickle and unappreciative lovers is a subtext that runs throughout eternal sunshine, with “yes, and?” as the most full-throated clapback against parasocial mouthbreathers speculating on her private life. Grande clearly relishes her ability to twist the knife as a songwriter. Some of her most shocking and funny lines come through as she plays up the spectacle of her divorce for all its horror: seemingly referring to her marriage as a “situationship” (“don’t wanna break up again)”, alluding to cheating (“eternal sunshine”), flagrantly spreading disinformation (“true story”), and finally providing us with the gorgeous couplet “Your business is yours and mine is mine/Why do you care so much whose **** I ride?” It’s to her credit, that she’s not only lived up vocally to the initial Mariah comparisons, but has a strain of surreal humor and outright weirdness that informs so much of her music.
During a production lull on Wicked brought on by the SAG strike, Grande flew to New York and reassembled her usual cast of collaborators including Max Martin, Shintaro Yasuda, and Ilya Salmanzadeh, albeit with the notable absence of her longtime songwriting partners, Tayla Parx and Victoria Monét. The record is split between the pillowy, mid-tempo R&B that we’ve come to expect from Ari and some interesting but shaky left turns. The leak and subsequent TikTok virality of her song “Fantasize” inspired Grande to release her own take on ornate Y2K production with “the boy is mine,” an excellent, precision-engineered track with stuttering, flashy synths that leave enough atmosphere for her voice to soar. Other genre flourishes are less successful. The orchestral disco of “bye” feels one-dimensional set against the mirror ball radiance of her voice and the alt-rock strum of “imperfect for you” suggests we’re getting an anthem but barely crests above a lullaby.
In contrast to Positions, where Grande flaunted the full extent of her range with whistle notes and filigreed melisma on nearly every track, eternal sunshine is an exercise in restraint. Apart from the scorching R&B fireworks of “true story,” there is very little outright belting on display, but her talent as an arranger shines with some absolutely gorgeous harmonies across the board. On songs like the title track and “we can’t be friends,” Grande adopts an aching tone that’s reminiscent of her heroine, Imogen Heap, communicating both a bruised strength and highlighting her underappreciated ability to convey more subtle colors with her voice. The latter track’s knockoff Robyn beat wouldn’t be as nearly as affecting without Grande’s gorgeously wounded performance, and what she makes out of “Know that you made me/I don’t like how you paint me, yet I’m still here hanging,” as if she were being pierced by her ex’s misunderstanding in real time.
Grande’s lyrics don’t always rise to the sophistication of her vocals, she occasionally settles for stock phrases (“I’ll play the villain if you need me to”) or scrambles for syllables (on “don’t wanna break up again” she rhymes “codependency” with “therapy”). Between Monét and Parx’s absence, her newfound enunciation, and the more obviously canned Max Martin instrumentals, a less generous interpretation would be to wonder if the limits of her songwriting didn’t constrain the more vocal pyrotechnics. But taken from another angle, it’s interesting to regard her choices as a step toward becoming a fundamentally different kind of singer. In an interview with Zach Sang, Grande emphasized the importance of distinguishing between herself as a person and a pop star, and this more subdued, less showy register could very well be the ticket, a carefully considered adaptation for protecting her hard-won sense of self.
