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.
