Is Angry Ariana the Best Ariana?
Ariana Grande released her eighth album last Friday, July 31, and it is not built to soothe. petal (Republic) runs 12 tracks in 36 minutes, and the register is fury. The critics cannot agree on what to do with that. At Album of the Year the critic score sits at 63 across ten reviews, stretching from a 90 rave at Sputnikmusic and an 80 from Rolling Stone down to a 40 at The Independent, with Pitchfork idling at 65 in the middle. Fans have no such confusion: 75 from more than 6,000 ratings, and a comment section busy arguing that petal might be even better than eternal sunshine.
Our verdict: the fans are grading the right rubric. The rave called petal a "gorgeous bloom" emerging from "unfiltered rage," and that is the accurate read. The gloss of her recent records has been sanded off; what remains is blunt, close, and openly angry, the sharpest she has sounded since thank u, next. Notice that even the lukewarm reviews keep describing something compelling. The Guardian, in its 60, hears "dark blooms of haunted electronics." Pitchfork concedes a record that "scans as intimate and experimental." Read those phrases cold and they sound like reasons to press play. The middling scores are docking her for messiness on an album where mess is the material.
The counter-case deserves a fair hearing. At 36 minutes across twelve tracks, petal is slight by her standards, and the murk it works in can shade into formless if what you want is hooks. She is pop's great technician, and anyone arriving for the layered vocal architecture of Sweetener will find this one deliberately unvarnished. That is a real trade, not a flaw we are ignoring. But a stripped wall is still a choice a builder makes, and 6,062 fan ratings landing at 75 in the first week suggest listeners heard the intent even where reviewers wanted a different album.
So where does that leave the petal-curious? Start with the catalog that built to this moment. Below is our ranking of the four albums on CrossBinge; slot petal wherever your tolerance for beautiful bad temper sits. The fans currently place it just above eternal sunshine. We think it is playing for the top rung.
