Divorce is the hot cultural topic of the year, judging by 2024’s most-discussed memoir, magazine column, and 50-part, eight-hour TikTok series titled “Who TF Did I Marry?” The specifics of each tale differ—unhappy families and all that—but they all share something: a pretense of public service. Lyz Lenz warns women that the institution of marriage is sexist; Emily Gould practices radical honesty about mental health; Reesa Teesa exposes a dating-app scammer. Having a larger point, a useful meaning, helps class up what could otherwise look like oversharing. We in the audience can tell ourselves we’re not voyeurs; we’re students.
Uh-huh. Whatever else we’re getting from consuming relationship drama, we’re getting entertainment. Just look to the celebrity-gossip ecosystem, which is as robust as ever despite various reckonings—take Britney Spears’s saga—demonstrating it as immoral, bigoted, vapid, and fake. On her recent single “Yes, and?” the ever-scrutinized pop star Ariana Grande asked, “Why do you care whose **** I ride? Why?” The answer is complicated—human behavior and misogyny are probably in the mix—but also simple. Judging other people’s choices can make us feel better about our own. And some things, such as strangers’ most intimate secrets, are just plain interesting.
Grande’s question is, in fact, a little hypocritical. Celebrities, like memoirists, are becoming more and more canny about feeding their personal life directly to the public. In pop music, the precise and writerly work of Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo invite the audience to project real human faces onto otherwise universal stories about betrayal and heartbreak. Grande, the former Nickelodeon star with woodwind-like vocal chords, is their analogue in the world of dance-pop. Her new album, Eternal Sunshine, delves into her recent divorce in a fashion that’s meticulous, dishy, and a little poisonous.
I swear I have tried to remain only vaguely aware of Grande’s, or any other musician’s, love life. But she’s made it part of her act at least since titling a song “Pete Davidson” while dating the then–SNL cast member in 2018. Months later, her single “Thank U, Next” named him amid a lyrical list of ex-boyfriends. Her most recent body of work before now, 2020’s Positions, was recorded in the early throes of romance with the real-estate agent Dalton Gomez, whom she would soon marry. A quick, sinuous collection of R&B songs about sex, the album felt like a cliffhanger on the way to a traditional happily ever after: “If I put it quite plainly / Just gimme them babies,” Grande trilled.
But her next chapter turned out to have a few twists, which she now addresses on Eternal Sunshine. She and Gomez divorced last year amid reports that she was dating Ethan Slater, her co-star in the upcoming film adaptation of Wicked. Slater’s estranged wife gave an angry statement to Page Six, implying that Grande was—to use a term that online commenters circulated then ad nauseum—a “homewrecker.” In a year-end post on Instagram, Grande wrote, “i have never felt more pride or joy or love while simultaneously feeling so deeply misunderstood by people who don’t know me.” Shortly after, she announced her next album.
Tumultuous though these developments seem, Grande’s new music sounds controlled and tender. The producer Max Martin is known for explosively catchy music, but on Eternal Sunshine, he and his team show their subtlety. Jazzy key changes, ornately stacked harmonies, and quavering synth arpeggios suggest a common ground between the soul producer Quincy Jones and the electronic diva Robyn. Grande mostly forgoes belting for a less showy, but still difficult, kind of vocal: rasping with such gentle steadiness that it brings to mind the thought of a nurse dressing a wound.
Not everything on Eternal Sunshine is successful; the softness of the production can verge into blandness, its bittersweetness becoming noncommittal. Various melodies echo sharper, more memorable kiss-off tracks of this millennium, including Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” and Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself.” Grande sometimes leans on platitudes for filler: “The stars, they aligned,” she sings.
Mostly, however, Grande’s candor gives the songs an edge. Lest anyone think she’s singing allegorically, she names her own best friend in the scene-setting disco track “Bye”: “So I grab my stuff / Courtney just pulled up in the driveway.” Later, Grande presents herself as being “too much” for her ex, who lied, delayed therapy, and started sleeping with someone else (“Hope you feel alright when you’re in her,” Grande coos in an absent-minded tone). As for her new guy, his affection was refreshing “like the first sip of wine after a long day” or “like my biggest fan when I hear what the critiques say.” Throughout, Grande extends saintly kindness and understanding (or is it passive aggression?) to the guy she’s leaving behind. “Hope you’ll still think fondly of our little life,” she sings.
The main message behind this laundry-airing is … to follow your heart. On the album’s closing song, Grande sings about the “ordinary things” in life that are ennobled by true love, and Grande’s grandmother shares a spoken-word reflection about adoring her late husband. The idealism is sweet, but it’s not really where the emotional pull of the album comes from. Rather, the intrigue here lies in the fact that Grande—at least the Grande that projects herself in her songs—comes off as knowingly fickle, even reckless. She flips off the naysayers on “Yes, and?,” a gliding club track (which has a perfect opening line for 2024: “In case you haven’t noticed / Well, everybody’s tired”). But mostly she leaves her story’s moral tension unresolved. “I’ll play the villain if you need me to,” she sings on the brooding “True Story.”
So, do we need her to play the villain? Psychologically, as listeners, for fun, perhaps. Socially, as citizens, no, it does not matter whom Ariana Grande spends her nights with. Judging other people is inevitable; sharing those judgments on the internet is not. Dissect her story with your real-life friends as this effective and sad album sticks around, soundtracking the messy lives most of us have the fortune to navigate in private.
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