Ariana Grande has no refractory period. Apparently, her latest album, Thank U, Next, took just a week to write. It became the singer’s second #1 album in less than six months, debuting atop the chart this week; Sweetener did the same in September. Now, she’s become the first artist to have the top three songs simultaneously since The Beatles did it in 1964. The Beatles. This makes her the only solo artist to have pulled it off.
Success this emphatic doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the logical outcome of her being the most fascinating pop star of 2018, which came after her annus horribilis. Following the horrific bombing at her Manchester concert in 2017, the singer experienced PTSD and postponed the rest of her international tour. “No Tears Left to Cry,” her first song after the tragedy, came out in April 2018—less than a year ago—and yet feels like it’s from a completely different era of her career altogether.
This year hasn’t exactly been all roses. In May, Grande broke up with Mac Miller and started seeing Pete Davidson after Instagram flirtations and fan sightings of the two together. In June, Grande and Davidson announced they were engaged; matching tattoos ensued. Sweetener came out in August, featuring a song called “Pete Davidson.” But Miller passed away in September, and the Davidson–Grande engagement was called off in October. “Thank U, Next,” featuring a self-love message that redefined the breakup pop hit, dropped in November.
“Thank U, Next” was bracingly blithe. Instead of leaning on a mopey post-relationship mood, it celebrated emotional growth and increased devotion to herself. It came out so soon after her split with Davidson that it was impossible not to see it as a direct response to that event. (She also pointedly released the song a mere 30 minutes before he was due to appear on Saturday Night Live.) We didn’t have to do any guesswork, anyway: Grande went ahead and named several of her exes, including Davidson and Miller, in the song. We aren’t used to seeing pop stars directly addressing their personal lives; compare the coy teases of Taylor Swift or the silent implications of Beyoncé.
Grande’s honesty and sheer speed gave follow-up album Thank U, Next a rare sheen of transparency. It would be foolish to think every lyric in the album is a literal reference to Grande’s life, but anyone who reads any magazine knows at least a little about the context of its creation. Rather than being a blow-by-blow documentation of what happens to a pop star when she breaks off an engagement, it’s a remarkably coherent expression of a particular duality of mood. It’s one Grande has been perfecting her whole career: horny + emotional.
Ahead of its release, Grande told Billboard Thank U, Next would be all “feminine energy and champagne and music and laughter and crying.” During a performance on Ellen, she teased that it would be something like “if The First Wives Club were an album.” These are apt descriptions; Thank U Next is effervescent and confident, almost boastful. Its ease suits its attitude, one that’s familiar to anyone who’s gone through a break-up, probably: She doesn’t care, she so doesn’t care.
Structured like a real relationship headed for disaster, it progresses from the love-drunk cooing of “Imagine” to encroaching anxiety on “Needy”; she asks for space on “NASA” and spits disappointment on “Fake Smile.” Knowing what we know about the Grande-Miller-Davidson triangle, “Ghostin” feels like it’s telling us too much, about a crying woman being comforted by a man who knows she wants someone else.
But the album is best and most complicated when things get hornier. The opposite of Sweetener for Grande isn’t sour; it’s salty. “7 Rings,” which came out just before the album, positioned Grande as a moneyed-up big talker in the mode of rappers who gloat about gleaming cars, fat stacks, and harems of “bitches.” In Grande’s case, though, the bitches are her BFFs; her cash buys them friendship rings at Tiffany, no need to peer wistfully through the window. “I want it / I got it,” she purrs, thirsting for copious, buyable stuff. Elsewhere, say in “Bloodline,” she pursues liaisons very unlike her 0–100 commitment to Davidson. No matching tattoos, just “Love me, thank you, leave me / Put it down, then it’s time to go.”
Thank U, Next is horny, but horny in the most Cancerian way. That is, it’s Emotions Central. Relationships? About emotions. One night stands? Also about emotions. In Grande’s songs, sexuality can save her; on the Max Martin–produced banger “Bad Idea,” she proposes sex as an anaesthetic: “I’ma call you over here to numb the pain…. Forget about it, yeah, forget about him, yeah / Forget about me.”
Then there’s the outrageous “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored,” the mere title of which whipped Arianators into a soufflé of speculative anticipation. The song was exactly what the title promised: a hubris-tinged assertion of desire. “Took one fuckin’ look at your face,” she sings. “Now I wanna know how you taste.” The mood, though, is more protective hyperbole than Sluts Forever—the pose of a girl who’s just seen an ex walk in the club and grabs whichever beefcake is closest.
None of this would feel at all satisfying if the music wasn’t any good. We’ve known forever that Grande’s voice is one of the best in the game. On earlier albums, Grande worked it like a racehorse, putting her range and lung capacity forcefully through their paces. In 2019, she’s already proved all that. Now, instead of turning up the volume every time she climbs a scale, she’ll let a note trail off like smoke or ping like crystal. On Thank U, Next, she dwells drolly in her lower range and treats vocals like percussion, rippling through spoken triplets and punctuating choruses with low-pitched yuhs. The album is also super witty and intimate and fun, referencing NSYNC and sampling A Star Is Born drag queen Shangela and Grande’s own grandmother, Marjorie. Simply put, it slaps.
Thank U, Next is just 41 minutes long. Like pink champagne—Grande’s drink of choice—it’s a sparkling pleasure, over before you even realized you were enjoying it. So then you go back for more. Plenty of listeners have done the same: Every song on the album is currently in the Billboard Hot 100, another feather in Grande’s cap. It’s proof that the combination of perceived authenticity, the public velocity of her emotional life, and her maturity as an artist have alchemized into an unprecedented popularity. “still cant believe this is real fr,” she tweeted. “thanks for making history with ya girl today. and for making me feel loved. bye crying.”
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