Ariana Grande review, Petal: She can be magnificent – so why is her new album so listless and bland?

Roisin O'Connor Fri, July 31, 2026 at 12:38 PM UTC

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Sometimes “ethereal” can be a byword for bland. Ariana Grande’s eighth studio album, Petal, is a mostly torpid record on which the production (by Grande and her longtime collaborators Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh) smothers her voice in the most infuriating fashion. It's like she doesn't want you to hear what she has to say, choosing instead to withdraw into shadows.

Grande said in a recent interview that she wrote this album from a place of “unfiltered rage”, and certainly there’s an iciness to her famous four-octave voice, a laced poison beneath the prettiness.

And can you blame her? She’s coming off the back of the circus that was the Wicked: For Good press tour, during which her interactions with co-star Cynthia Erivo were scrutinised to the point of insanity. There was online bullying over her personal relationships, and discourse surrounding her body that has oscillated wildly from genuine concern to plain malice. Oh, and Grande – who has PTSD from the terrorist attack on her 2017 concert in Manchester – was physically accosted by a man on the red carpet in Singapore (he was arrested and banned from the country).

So yes, Grande has every right to be angry. Only she doesn’t sound it on Petal. Instead she sounds tired, distracted, listless. I was hardly expecting full-throttle ragers, but it’s as though she can barely muster the energy to breathe into the mic, let alone channel any kind of mood beyond plain bored. It’s enough to make you wonder if she wanted to make this album.

The cover art for 'Petal' (Press)

Even the instrumentation is ghostly, soaked in reverb and with Grande’s vocals layered and echoing across each song. You desperately want something substantial to cling onto, but it’s always out of reach, nowhere near as satisfying as the sex she sings about on “Big Feelings” (“pussy so sweet, a tear fell from his eye”). Often her vocals are so strangled by the production that many of the lyrics are hard to decipher. Perhaps it’s intentional, as Grande’s attitude across the record seems to be, “You don’t get me, and I don’t care.”

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But it’s a real shame, because there’s some very strong songwriting on here (“My dead-ends are gathered around, dressed as friends/ Just so I don’t get hurt again,” she sings on “Oh Well”). “Some”, however, being the operative word. “Big Feelings” and “Never Get Over Me” (the latter a “Dangerous Woman” rehash) are screaming bloody filler, music for a hair salon played over the blast of hairdryers and chatter. “Bad Thing (Bunny Hop)” is an odd outlier, Grande lusting after someone she hadn’t noticed before. It regurgitates the gloopy, underwater synth sounds from single “Hate That I Made U Love Me”.

It doesn’t bode well that “Hate That…” is by far the best song on the album, although it is excellent. This is clearly the rage Grande was talking about, seemingly pointed at an ex (it was reported in June that she and her Wicked co-star Ethan Slater had quietly parted ways after two years together) and at her most critical “fans”. Her focus is laser-sharp, words landing with an assassin’s aim: “Just know that I will find my way from you/ Like flowers from a tomb while you decide who you are.” She’s singing from the siren’s perspective, flipping the misogynist narrative she’s been plagued with for some time, as though the men who pursue her have no autonomy in the matter.

“Oh Well” is almost as good, a rare song where her voice is allowed to shine through, glimmering, over sharp stuttery beats and celestial synth flashes, like ripples of light refracting through an ocean’s surface. It’s not a comforting song, as Grande seemingly seeks distraction in a dark place, or else is maybe doing things just for the plot: “Something, something new to keep creative/ Just anything to not let in your kindness.”

On “Freak”, that fatigue finally hardens into something with more bite; Sleeping Beauty wakes to find she actually prefers the forest of thorns around her. “Wake me when all this s*** is over,” she sings, “I know too much for now/ Will them and their poison ever sober/ I don’t know her.” Grande, whose public persona is gentle, polite, wide-eyed, now refuses to give the baying crowd what they want, even if she’s not willing to step away from fame: “Lost without your light/ I can’t leave your side/ It’s so peculiar, won’t you stay a while?”

You empathise when she admits it’s “hard to believe in a perfect ending”, on the bittersweet closer “Nowhere, Nobody”. In fact, all of her favourite stories “end in some kind of catastrophe”, she sings on “Petal”. This album is not that. It’s a chapter, a strange one that demonstrates, sometimes, how magnificent Grande can be. Making it all the more disappointing when she isn’t.

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”