Album Review: Sweetener by Ariana Grande

It’s hard not to read the upside down shot of Ariana Grande that graces the cover of her fifth album as a metaphor for the upending of her world on May 22 2017.

The Manchester bombing was, above all else, an unthinkable horror perpetuated against innocent concert-goers.

But while sympathies in the first instance of course go to the 23 who lost their lives and the some 130 others injured in the blast, the attack clearly also devastated Grande, who blinked back tears when returning to perform in at the One Love Manchester event the following week.

To have been adjacent to such an atrocity was obviously hugely traumatic to the Florida singer. She has responded in the best way possible – refusing to be cowed and releasing a confident and upbeat pop sobriquet. A young woman who knows her mind and is at ease with her sensual side she embodies everything that extremists fear and hate and simply by existing Sweetener counts as a triumph.

So it’s a bonus that it’s also a great record, one that sees the now 25 year-old further distance herself from the teenage stardom phase of her career (her first brush with fame was via a Nickelodeon drama). It’s smart, slinky, occasionally spiky – a calling card from an artist ready to leave Tweendom behind and take her place the grown-ups table.

Work on Sweetener had actually began prior to Manchester. However, in the aftermath Grande and her producer, Pharrell Williams, understandably concluded that the project required a “hard reset”.

She had already fought a battle with her record label for Williams to be in the studio (he ended up overseeing roughly half of the LP, with Swedish pop sorcerer Max Martin producing the bulk of the other material). What Grande had in mind was baring a part of herself she had rarely shared with her fans – the vulnerability behind the chart princess exterior.

But it turned out that, beneath the candy-cane shell, Grande was a tough woman who knew her mind. She thus sounds completely at home singing against William’s diamond-sharp beats and is having fun sparring with Nicki Minaj on ‘The Light Is Coming’, where she drops an f-bomb with casual aplomb.

She likewise holds her own jiving with Pharrell on ‘Blazed’, which sounds like a twisted half-sibling to the Neptunes’ man’s ‘Happy’ – though here the self-satisfaction that can blight his vocal parts is offset by Grande’s hard-swinging delivery. He’s the producer, she’s the boss.

The other high point is ‘No Tears Left To Cry’, a big Max Martin number that, though it does not explicitly reference, Manchester cannot be listened to in any context other than the events of last year. It’s a swooping, swooning epic – a heat seeker that wears its heart on its epaulettes and confirms that, having walked through the valley, Grande is older, wiser, and ready for her moment.

Sweetener is out now.