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“Eternal Sunshine” is Grande’s most sustained collaboration with pop’s personal Wizard of Oz, the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin, with whom she wrote or produced 11 of its 13 tracks. (Ilya Salmanzadeh, a longtime collaborator of each Grande and Martin, additionally helped write and produce a lot of the album.) Unsurprisingly, that is one among Grande’s most meticulously crafted and texturally constant releases — it sounds as costly because the gleaming treasures she sang about on “7 Rings” — although it lacks the whispered asides, tough edges and irreverent humor that made these final two albums so enjoyable. Still, “Eternal Sunshine” is awash in lavish environment, adventurous melodies and an emotional weight that brings a brand new sophistication to Grande’s songcraft.
On a short introduction subtitled “End of the World,” Grande expresses doubts a couple of relationship and pops a burning query within the glowing decrease depths of her register: “If all of it ended tomorrow, would I be the one in your thoughts?” The reply lies within the title of the next music: “Bye.”
That monitor, a disco delicacy as richly layered as a five-tier cake, is likely one of the album’s best moments — a showcase for each the belt-it-out energy and the stop-on-a-dime agility of Grande’s voice. Martin’s method to pop construction is famously inflexible, however all through “Eternal Sunshine,” Grande proves that she is a gifted and nimble sufficient singer to eke out appreciable melodic freedom inside his bounds. On the title monitor’s wrenching falsetto refrain, and on the ecstatic bridge of the second single, “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love),” she glides effortlessly throughout the kinds of notes that lots of her friends can solely stare upon like distant stars.
“Eternal Sunshine” is strongest when it leans hardest into R&B, a style Grande impressively embraced on her gorgeously sung if considerably historically organized 2013 debut, “Yours Truly.” Here, and on a very robust stretch in the course of the album, she and Martin coat the style’s liquid cadences in a retro-futuristic Y2K-era sheen.
A molten-metal bass line warps its approach via “True Story,” a slinky music in regards to the finger-pointing stage of a relationship’s demise (“I’ll play the villain should you want me to, I understand how this goes,” Grande sings with a resigned shrug). “The Boy Is Mine,” a lusty music a couple of forbidden crush, name-checks Brandy and Monica’s 1998 hit and options the form of stuttering percussion that just about calls for some stomping boy-band choreography. When you’re working with Martin, the man who co-wrote “I Want It That Way” and “It’s Gonna Be Me” — why not?
