We have some thoughts…
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[5.67]
David Allun Jones: Once upon a time, the kind of meta-commentary Ariana chose to embed within her music gave us playful nuggets like “Thank U, Next” and “Yes, And?”. After years of being bombarded with increasingly gross public discourse concerning her every move and appearance though, it’s completely understandable how she could begin to fold under the oppression and opt to start shading her theater-kid pop-art in darker hues. Showing little of that prior glass-shattering effervescence, “Petal” instead paints a gilded cage of horrors. Its lyrics spill forth like a Notes app entry for Ariana’s eyes only, engaging with the criticism she inspires through pangs of sighed bitterness (“It’s such a fucked situation”), steely defiance (“But I don’t need someone to save me/’Cause this music and I will never die”) and resigned self-analysis (“Trying different boys on for size/If this is my curse, I’ll let it ride”). The claustrophobic Upside-Down World beat unfortunately offers no hope for any kind of end-of-tunnel reprieve, nightmarish piano pinks and sudden blasts of buzzing bass framing her intimate confessions in a Weeknd-nodding Backrooms maze she may never truly escape.
[8]
Charlotte Gaze: Finding herself back in the midst of a firestorm of gossip and moral outrage, Ariana Grande returns to the cheeky defiance that “7 Rings” embodied. With mysteriously less melanin this time, of course. She’s dangerously aware of her role as the performer, her resentment of the audience reaching a fever pitch. Of course, denial of the audience is no substitute for belief in oneself, and as “Petal” shows, she has many questions about who and where she is, and not as many answers as she’d like. The lyrics are full of absolute statements — “I don’t need someone to save me,” “this is not a cry for help,” “I will never die,” “bitch, I’m practically drowning in my blessings” — and as they stack up, they don’t register as raw confidence so much as bristling defensiveness. While that may have been the intent given the music sounds so knowingly fragile, and “Petal” does succeed to a degree at showing off some real and uncomfortable feelings, I would much have preferred an approach of willing vulnerability. That likely would have been better for everyone.
[6]
Ian Mathers: I still feel like I’m missing some lore drops, and at least “Hate That I Made You Love Me” has a chorus I find myself humming for a bit after I hear it in the wild.
[5]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I really want someone to explain what this song is about, because even with the Ariana Twitter-verse at all time levels of buzz and discourse, this song remains utterly opaque.
[3]
Alfred Soto: I get it — the switch to a higher register signifies her flowering. It didn’t have to sound irritating.
[5]
Claire Davidson: I’ll be honest, I haven’t listened to Petal beyond the singles we’ve covered for this website. If I ever do sit down with it, I doubt I’ll be able to interact with it as anything other than a historical curio — frankly, the idea of financially contributing to its release at all makes me queasy. Now that Ariana Grande’s team has announced she’ll be taking a hiatus from public life, there’s no use beating around the bush: both the Petal album cycle and the world tour from which it emerged have directly contributed to Grande’s obvious health crisis, exhausting her visibly malnourished body and exposing her to the same deafening scrutiny that likely fuelled her eating disorder in the first place. That no one on Grande’s team stopped the tour and album is galling enough, indicative of a music industry that still treats its female stars like grist for the mill of public consumption. The ugly circumstances palpably bleed into the music, too. The song “Petal” is forged in little more than a two-note riff of programmed strings, their slimy coating causing the track’s refined posture to curdle into waves of ersatz sneering. That stiffly pointed melody never finds a comfortable landing pad in the track’s lurching percussion and gurgling synth-bass, the latter of which sounds so sour as to be deliberately alienating. The sharp contrast between the song’s sonic fragility and lumbering pace becomes most egregious on the chorus, where Grande strains to hit shattering high notes in falsetto and only adds to the track’s feeling of grating shrillness. The whole track sounds as if it’s being delivered through gritted teeth: in refuting the public’s desire to see women endure traumatic strife, Grande claims on the second verse that she is “not a victim,” and that she is in fact “practically drowning in [her] blessings.” Mind you, this sentiment comes on a song so arch that it still manages to reinforce the melodrama Grande claims to disdain — and, more to the point, is included on the same album as “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” a song where Grande openly lambasts her own fanbase for interrogating her private life. All this paranoia is bound to get worse, too: who’s to say when that aforementioned hiatus will actually take place, since Grande is apparently still going to do press for Focker-in-Law — a pointless entry in an already awful franchise, and one that only recruited Grande in the first place because one of its former marquee names was accused of sexual assault since the last film’s release. I genuinely worry that we might not get another Ariana Grande album at all, and what a horrible conclusion “Petal” would be: a turgid, poorly-mixed screed born of a culture that demands celebrities constantly oversaturate their chosen markets, lest the public forget about them for even a second.
[3]
Nortey Dowuona: “Ghostin'” (Max & Ilya + Victoria Monét): A softer, gentler song that luxuriates in its washed out pop synths and well arranged strings, but feels deeply resonant for the painterly lyrics cowritten by Savan Kotecha, Tayla Parx and Victoria, who flesh out, color and enliven the song beyond it’s washed out, soft splendor, allowing Ariana’s voice to strength to imbue each lyric with the anguish that it needs, even allowing the muddy overdubs to attain a sense of power through each line.
“We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)” (Max & Ilya +Ariana Grande): a more intense, vibrant song that sketches in the frustration and despair that is seemingly following Ariana through her music to this point, but that is where it remains: sketches. Unlike “Though I wish he were here instead/Don’t want that living in your head/He just comes to visit me/When I’m dreaming every now and then” which is crushing in its grief and shame, “Know that you made me/I don’t like how you paint me/yet I’m still here hanging/Not what you made me” is indistinct, plain, dull. Relying on the powerful and silky voice Ariana still possesses, the song is still stirring, but the effect of displaying this despair is fading with each reiteration.
“Petal” (Max & Ilya +Ariana Grande): a bright, limpid song with the same dull, plain lyrics. Even “It’s such a fucked situation/Petal in the pavement/Just as long as she keeps getting it right/Heartbreak won’t bite here in paradise” lands with a thud, neither poetic nor piercing, a flimsy assertion of agency and agility that sounds just as unconvincing and timid as she doesn’t mean it to be. And even her voice is thinner, weaker and flatter, her muddy overdubs no longer moving and lush, but tinny shavings pushed into each side of the mix to add a fullness the song does not have. Not every flower survives the concrete.
[4]
Tom Feckerdt: I realize that time has essentially flattened and there’s no real felt material difference between now and 30 years ago, but we really shouldn’t take for granted that Max Martin’s still doing musically relevant and successful work long after getting his start in 1996. You couldn’t say that in, say, 2011 about any producer who broke through in 1981. So props to Martin and his Swedish mega-team for looking for ways to adapt with the times, which these days means working within the smaller, lo-fi-ish sound of pop. The previous Ariana Grande album was a good first approximation, last year’s Taylor Swift album played it a bit better (albeit with substantially worse material), and now with Petal it seems the main sonic implications of that shift have been fully incorporated. “Petal” isn’t as meaty a tune as “Hate That I Made You Love Me” but the arrangement is far more intricate and less mushy. It basically works as an exercise in time signatures, switching back and forth from a 4/4 to a waltz, and given that it keeps its ambitions relatively mild, it’s able to really dig into how it constructs and layers its creeping, dour mood. The first verse is ambiguous since it doesn’t outline a groove, the chorus only accentuates that state of limbo as we deal with Grande’s consolidated, seething bitterness (I shuddered the first time I heard her sing the hook, so self-contained, her teeth clenched), and the “drop” leading into the second verse pulls us back with a plummeting, unmistakable 4/4 that she uses to lay down her grievances and fuck-yous in plenty detail. Meanwhile, main producer Ilya, a man with a studied interest in gritty feel-bad soundscapes, pairs so many antiseptic, separated sounds (check the whirling clean-distorted synth in the second verse, a relic of Martin’s dubstep flirtations from the early 2010s) with a deliberately artificial vinyl crack layer, hiding Grande’s voice through multiple filters and harmonies but also letting her loose almost at random (“Byee! / This time for real…”) It’s very disorientating, only getting more volatile as it goes on. The end result is a sonic world that all but downplays the words’ supposedly self-assured vibe, or at least presents them in a more compromised light, one where there’s less emphasis on “petal in the pavement” and more on “it’s such a fucked situation.” A shame that such intricate ideas got eclipsed by, y’know, all the other stuff.
[8]
Al Varela: Ariana Grande has a right to be angry more than most artists within the industry. There’s a lot that she’s been through, some that we’re aware of and probably others that are none of our business. And while publicly she’s been willing to continue being all smiles, something definitely changed in between Positions and Eternal Sunshine that maybe recontextualized a lot of things for her, and it’s only now starting to bleed into the music. If she was being a playful heel on “Hate That I Made You Love Me”, she’s just a full-on heel on “Petal”. Snapping at the fanbase and the press for their complete disregard of her as a person, their fandom dictated by hyper-fixating on her relationships and personal life rather than by the music she puts her sweat and tears into. She gets downright mean in the second verse, refusing to be seen as a victim or catering to any image that other people might be conjuring up for her. The production itself is also a little uncanny for Ariana, going for this harsh waltz that’s seemingly elegant as the petal in the pavement, but interspersed with sharp chimes and blown-out static that almost sounds like the song itself is breaking at the seams. On a pure craft level, “Petal” is kind of brilliant. And yet Ariana can’t bring herself but to mostly stay in that willowy, soft whisper. She probably could stand to be a little angrier, show some grit in her voice, but why would she? That’d be giving them what they want.
[9]