Premature Evaluation: Ariana Grande petal

Babydoll/Republic/UMG2026I was worried about this one. On her endless, overlapping press tours to promote the Wicked movies, Ariana Grande seemed eager to leave pop-music royalty behind, to throw herself into the kind of theater-kid acting roles that the big-budget Broadway adaptations offered her. She now looks, talks, and moves like a completely different person than the sparkling, self-aware diva who conquered the pop landscape and bent it to her will in the first place. It was a bit surprising when Grande announced both an arena tour and an album earlier this year, and it came with a weird streak of noblesse oblige, as if she simply deigned to stop by the pop-music party on her way to the Focker-In-Law premiere. (That movie looks quite bad, by the way.) Lead single "hate that i made you love me" was the only song that Grande shared before the album came out today, and it didn't exactly dispel any fears. Musically, the track is so subdued that it's barely even there, burying its keyboard-preset chug and gentle harmonies under aggressively tasteful studio craft. Lyrically, it was hard to interpret the song as anything other than a fuck-you to the fans whose parasocial relationshi...