Boca Raton musical-theater prodigy Ariana Grande initially intended to pour her heart into her starring role as Glinda in the movie adaptation of Wicked before returning to music. Then the winds shifted: SAG-AFTRA and WGA went on strike, there were months of rumors of her cheating with her co-star Ethan Slater, and Grande filed for divorce from Dalton Gomez, her husband of over two years. She also rang pop-radio head chef and longtime collaborator Max Martin — who had previously drizzled rock, reggae, and R&B into tart electro-funk reductions like “Side to Side,” “Dangerous Woman,” and “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored” — to set to work on new songs. The resulting album — Eternal Sunshine, Grande’s seventh — challenges the notion that she treated Gomez unfairly while observing the modern R&B and pop conventions longtime listeners and casual onlookers expect.
Sunshine’s marquee star is not just a generational vocal talent but, as she explained in a recent visit to the Zach Sang Show, a pop star occasionally daunted by the obligations that come with her following. These are actors’ instincts. The world — stadiums, TVs, phones — is a stage, and Grande is a student of her craft. Her hits wedge themselves between mainstream trends and pop-music history such that Eternal Sunshine’s “Yes, And?” can seem both aware of the ballroom, house, and disco taxonomies Beyoncé’s Renaissance researched and the early-’90s deluge of divas dominating dance tracks. As she framed it to Zane Lowe, the new album is “a lovely costume to wear.” Nearly ten years after Dangerous Woman, its femme fatale channels the grief-stricken romantic Jim Carrey played in the 2004 Michel Gondry film Grande’s new album gets its name (and a few lyrics) from.
Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s Joel Barish, these songs fill in our picture of the end of her marriage and shed terrible memories of betrayal and loneliness, releasing them for listeners to unpack their own romantic distress (or, as Grande has advised against, to show up in Gomez’s mentions looking for answers). R&B suits the album as a truth-teller’s genre, a perch whence hell is rained down on triflin’, good-for-nothing types of brothers. “True Story” serves up a familiar flavor of synth ambience and bouncing bass for Ari to tiptoe around the breathy delivery of early Christina Aguilera and the righteous animosity of “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay,” while gesturing to the audience lurking for clues about her private life: “I’ll play the villain if you need me to / I know how this goes, yeah / I’ll be the one you pay to see, play the scene / Roll the cameras please.” The title track dances around the vengeful pre-chorus melody of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” on the way to its own declaration of a lover’s wrongdoings: “So now we play our separate scenes / Now she’s in my bed laying on your chest / Now I’m in my head, wondering how it ends.” Later, “The Boy Is Mine” turns the tables, referencing the 1998 Brandy and Monica hit as it details retaliatory stepping out: “I take full accountability for all these tears / Promise you I’m not usually / Like, this shit, it’s like news to me / But I can’t ignore my heart, boy.”
Martin’s vintage R&B-pop airs tease out drama in Grande’s romantic life while nodding to the co-producer’s back catalogue. He has the nimbleness to circle every genre without quite diving in. Each production is a short but scenic twisting side-road journey to the highway, getting you to your destination screamingly fast with a bit of scenery to boot: In Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You Been Gone,” mannered guitar notes burst into a slick pop-punk that mirrors the singer’s hairpin turn from rage to relief; in Sweetener’s “God Is a Woman,” a riff suggestive of scratching at David Gilmour’s performance in Pink Floyd’s “Dogs” is subsumed by bubbly funk. The buoyancy of “True Story,” the symphony hits in “Bye,” and the pinballing vocals in “The Boy Is Mine” are coming from a lifetime pop-radio hybridizer who worked on “Tearin’ Up My Heart,” “I Want It That Way,” and “(You Drive Me) Crazy.”
The excited fan response to the leak of “Fantasize,” a hypothetical ’90s-girl-group theme Grande wrote for an unreleased television series by Seth MacFarlane, seems to have informed Eternal Sunshine as much as anything else. Like PinkPantheress’s Heaven Knows, this album’s specific spate of anachronisms — hefty servings of millennial Svengali pop offset by the muscular disco groove of “Bye,” the freestyle vapors in “Supernatural,” and the strong pitch for a VH1 Divas revival the “Yes, And?” Mariah remix is making — stamps it to an era of millennials and Gen X–ers pining for bygone culture, while zoomers discover and distort their parents’ favorites. It references roles and scenes while adapting itself astutely to the flavor of the charts in 2024. “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)” feeds your 1989 (Taylor’s Version) obsession with staccato synth notes. “Ordinary Things” deals in ecstatic coos and spitfire syllables, rubbing elbows with Kelela’s Raven and SZA’s SOS. The closer a song hews to Martin’s old hits, the more it inherits the feeling of R&B being spirited out of its original inner-city context and reshaped for mass appeal. This is pop music’s core process: It lifts and recontextualizes and expands, and that spreading can have a flattening effect.
Grande’s voice smooths out the almost painstakingly efficient, of-the-moment pop sensibilities displayed here, tipping the scales closer to R&B when it starts to feel like someone skimped on the swing in Swing Mob. Her delivery is clearer than ever now — thanks, you would think, to Wicked. “Supernatural” compares attraction to possession; the wounded “I Wish I Hated You” makes sure you hear her inhale before each line. Eternal Sunshine is, on the surface, an entertainment institution’s performance of intimacy in the midst of a massive multimedia push that put her on Saturday Night Live and the Oscars red carpet the same weekend her album came out. (She’s not accidentally giving off Glinda vibes during this rollout, right?)
Working on a great deal of the music alone and telling her rocky story via short, conversational dispatches lends the star-studded and star-crossed saga a more personal bent, leaving space for a few too many charmingly mundane turns of phrase like the memorable “I’ve been drinking coffee” exclamation in “34+35” off Positions. “The Boy Is Mine” has elicited chuckles for claiming to be “unproblematic,” as have the “self-soothe” and “co-dependency” in “Don’t Wanna Break Up Again.” (Giving YouTube astrologer Diana Garland a track to talk about Saturn returning and quoting meditation coach Davidji in the Zane interview, Grande lets her self-care journey trickle into the album and rollout.) The “situationship” in “Break Up” and the funny patch in “Wait for Your Love” — “Me and my truth, we sit in silence / Baby girl, it’s just me and you / ’Cause I don’t wanna argue, but I don’t wanna bite” — are trying too hard that you may not even care for the fluttering high notes and borderline new jack swing groove or the reedy exploration of the lower register.
You wanted fewer writers; you got fewer writers. It’s all relatable, heart-felt, and beautifully sung. At times you wish Rodney Jerkins or someone with a classic R&B pedigree showed up (you can’t help but wonder what might’ve been tighter if Grande waited for frequent songwriting partner/BFF Victoria Monet’s schedule to clear). Or that our stripped-down crew delivered more tunes like “I Wish I Hated You” and “Imperfect for You,” eschewing the booming, obvious Max Martin hook for lo-fi sounds and pairing brokenheartedness with broken equipment. But nestled in the middle of a high-stakes campaign, Eternal Sunshine is here to move units, to let the air out of ballooning narratives, to try out cool runs — and to salute Jim Carrey. Do we need it to do anything else?
