Ariana Grande, Sweetener review: A portrait of an artist in flux

Often unexpected, sometimes in a good way, but representing an artist trying to move forward while reluctant to relinquish old ideas

Listen to Sweetener for the first time and it’s hard not to parse every line for meaning. Ariana Grande’s fourth album is her first since a terrorist took 22 lives and injured more than 100 others after her concert in Manchester in May 2017. Hundreds more suffered from the trauma of the event, not least Grande herself.

The album opens with gravitas – a short a cappella snippet of “An Angel Cried” by The Four Seasons, her powerful voice unadorned but for a bit of echo. It suggests that we are in for Serious Music dealing with Serious Issues – but this mixed, intriguing and occasionally baffling album quickly changes tack, jerking from angels’ tears to The Pharrell Show.

Indeed, seven of the 15 tracks here have been drowned in producer Pharrell Williams’ bubblemint bounce – at points, it’s in danger of sounding more like his record than Grande’s.

You suspect, having worked heavily with methodical pop genius Max Martin for many years (and here on the more traditional half of the album), Grande wanted to throw the spaghetti at the wall musically and see what stuck.

The title track is particularly chaotic, with bleeps, bloops and a soundboard of sheesh!’s littering the bottom end as Grande gamely recites a meme-able hook. Maybe this is just what it sounds like to nuzzle at the cutting edge of pop, but there’s so much disparate noise going on that it’s hard to know.

Despite the producers’ heavy hands, Grande’s Ronettes-esque harmonies are frequently gorgeous and her warmth and wit manage to peek through. Though the sexy panting is a bit overdone, she melismas her way through every stage of a relationship, from gleeful flirting on the excellent Imogen Heap rework “Goodnight n Go” to the wonderfully sultry single “God Is a Woman” and the sad inevitability of “Every Time”, a heartbreaker set to a trap beat.

The emotional highlight is “Breathin’” (“people told me to medicate... but you tell me just keep breathin’”), a mental health bop over a good, solid pop beat. By contrast, Missy Elliott’s guest bars are a disaster. She phones in a verse so devoid of personality that it barely sounds like her on a dated, shambles of a song (”Borderline”) that should have been cut.

The ambitious, multilayered final song is where Grande deals most directly with the aftermath of last year. As a five-minute musical interpretation of the post-traumatic panic attacks Grande has suffered, “Get Well Soon” is not exactly enjoyable to listen to but admirable in its honesty; she has laid herself bare and fans affected (directly or otherwise) by the events in Manchester will find it a comfort.

It’s something approaching miraculous that Grande has managed to create and curate an album so devoid of despair, so full of enthusiasm for humanity. Often unexpected, sometimes in a good way, it is an album by an artist in flux – trying to move forward while reluctant to fully relinquish old ideas.

There’s a moment at the very end of “Goodnight n Go” when Grande is singing her way up the register and you mentally steel for autotune to kick in – but it doesn’t. It’s a strange trick of the brain and a reminder of the sheer brilliance of her voice, the one constant on a dizzying record.

‘Sweetener’ is out now