eternal sunshine artwork
Ariana Grande is healing, again. This, historically, has been a great thing for the top 40; her resilience is the magic that has fueled some of her biggest hits (see: “Break Free,” “no tears left to cry,” “thank u, next,” etc.) Her voice, one of the most ubiquitous in modern pop, practically epitomizes going onward and upward — four octaves, to be precise. This alchemy was blissfully unavoidable for the better part of the past decade, as her catalog racked up a new album practically every year. So when she delivers the line “this ain’t the first time I’ve been hostage to these tears” not two minutes into her new album eternal sunshine, it’s a cause for celebration, not concern: we are so back.
This is all the more emphatic given how long it's been since we’ve really heard from Grande. Following the release of positions back in 2020, she took a three-and-a-half-year break from recording new music: in recent interviews, she’s expressed a lack of boundaries in her career, which led to a strained relationship with music as a whole. Though her absence was felt during this period of reevaluation, headlines affirmed what was going on behind the scenes: there was a marriage, a subsequent divorce, a highly-scrutinized new romance, and a split from longtime manager Scooter Braun.
Something shifted when she began filming as Glinda in the forthcoming movie adaptation of Wicked, and when the SAG-AFTRA strike halted production on the film in summer 2023, Grande began to toy around with the idea of returning to the studio. eternal sunshine was born out of this post-movie clarity. She wrote and recorded most of the album in one big exhale this past winter at Jungle City, a nondescript recording studio tucked into the industrial Chelsea skyline. There, Grande often would cut vocals under a fortress of blankets so as not to veer far from the computer where she could then edit them.
It’s the sense of immediate catharsis that perhaps sets eternal sunshine ahead of her discography. Max Martin (whose collaborative relationship with Grande dates back to 2014) helms most of the production on the album, but save for the pummeling Swedish synths on “we can’t be friends,” his contributions feel more subtle. Trap beats and Y2K R&B dominate the sonic palette, with light psychedelic abstractions here and there — a sprinkling of castanets on “imperfect for you,” a swirling flute solo buried into the bridge of “yes, and.” Post-Wicked Grande has gained the enunciative poise of her character, Glinda, and at one point in the album her own good witch arrives via a sample of a YouTube astrologer.
Grande knows that when she puts out an album, there’s an expectation that she’ll answer to “There are parts of my life that [my fans] would love to know about and hard times I have been dealing with for the past year-and-a-half that they deserve to know about because they love me endlessly and care,” she once told us in her 2018 FADER cover story, about her album sweetener. “I don’t want to hide any pain from them because I can relate to their pain. Why not be in it together?”
Just when you think the album couldn’t sound any more like an Ariana Grande album, she dials things up with “true story” and “the boy is mine,” two songs that originate from a session of writing “parody” pop songs for an as-yet unreleased TV show. It’s the lick of villainy that people seem to want from her; not only can she have fun with it, but she can do it with unmatched precision, particularly on the title track, when a “Cry Me A River” interpolation segues into a hook laced with cheeky brilliance: “Now it’s like I’m looking in the mirror, hope you feel alright when you’re in her.”
When Grande announced that the album was to be titled eternal sunshine, fans wondered: was it just another weather motif from the girl who has sang at length about moonlight and raindrops, whose perfume bottle is the shape of a cloud? A tribute to the movie from the former screen name JimCarreyFan42? Taken as a whole, it’s an album about wanting to wipe your mind clean entirely of someone or something, to get a factory reset, and feel what bliss comes with ignorance. She can’t do that, but what she manages to accomplish on eternal sunshine seems to make a profound case for why this is ultimately a blessing. It’s the kind of album that could only be made with the wisdom of what’s come before it.
