POPJUICE

Two albums in six months, month after month of song releases: the Ariana Grande train is moving full steam ahead and it doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon.

It’s a release schedule that no other artist has attempted in recent times. For comparison, fellow artist Selena Gomez has not released a full-length album in over three years.

Are we getting too much Grande for our own good?

It’s a question that the ponytailed popstar can answer for you.

“I just want to talk to my fans and sing and write music and drop it the way these boys do. Why do they get to make records like that and I don’t?” she remarked in a cover story interview with Billboard.

It’s a bold move that risks overexposure, but she lets her music do the talking. Every song on Thank U, Next feels necessary, charting the trajectory of events that she has been through the past year.

One second she’s telling her lover to come back to her on Needy, then the next she’s considering leaving on ballad Ghostin.

It’s this sort of “however I feel, whenever I feel it” energy that has powered her recent releases, as she navigates through life in the wake of the rollercoaster of events that have happened since 2016’s Dangerous Woman.

“You don’t wanna leave me, but I’m tryna self-discover,” she sings on NASA.

And if you thought the danger-loving Ariana was buried, she comes back on reggaebanger Bloodline, an ode to friends with benefits that sounds like an inevitable sequel to Dangerous Woman’s Side To Side.

It makes for an album with different styles that somehow also manages to be Grande’s most cohesive effort to date. She maintains her moxie and braggadocio from start to finish, even in the vulnerable moments.

And for being her first without any features, Grande shows that she can certainly hold her own, on her own.