Album of the week: Ariana Grande – 'Petal'

Pint-sized powerhouse Ariana Grande is never – usually – knowingly understated. With a four-octave vocal range barely contained by a five-foot (and change) frame, the Florida native’s ability to scale the giddy pop-culture heights is (almost literally) unparalleled. Over the last decade and a half, a brace of songs comfortably in the billion streams club – ‘we can’t be friends (wait for your love)’, ‘Into You’, ‘Love Me Harder’, ‘One Last Time’, ‘7 Rings’, ‘Side to Side’, ‘Dangerous Woman’, ‘thank u, next’ – have powered her coolly, comfortably, emphatically far, far beyond her child actor origins on Nickelodeon.

And that’s pop-culture, not just pop. Nineteen years on from making her Broadway debut in the musical 13, 33-year-old Grande is a true triple-threat: she can sing, and then some. She can act, most recently in the two, $1.2 billion-grossing Wicked movies and, next up, in November’s hotly anticipated, um, “quad-quel” Focker-in-Law, her name already #icon enough for the movie poster to simply say “De Niro. Stiller. Grande”. And she can do, on Saturday Night Live or whatever chatshow, hilarious, tone-perfect impersonations of any other diva you throw her way, from Britney to Maria to Celine to the diva-est diva, Jennifer (Coolidge).

Grande, then, punches way above her height. Which is why the feeling of underwhelm on this eighth album hits harder. On petal, Grande’s ongoing and dedicated preference for lower-case titles is matched by equally committed lower-key energy. The overall mood is mid-tempo and middling, the sound burbling synthpop that rarely breaks a sweat. On an allegedly angry break-up album she's advertised as “a little feral”, its protagonist sounds unfocused and underpowered. Oh for some sonic rage.

At moments, certainly, there are Grande achievements. ‘hate that i made you love me’, co-written with Scandi hit-machine Max Martin, is a bittersweet kiss-off sung by a woman who was until recently dating actor Ethan Slater, the Wicked co-star who filed for divorce from his ex-wife during production on the first film. The glacially chilly title track – another Martin co-write – hits equally hard, its synth-goth keyboard stabs plunging as forcefully as the lyrics: “tryna feel something real / to cry again / they say the artist needs tears / to write again / all my favourite stories / end in some kind of catastrophe / but i don’t need someone to save me / cause this music and I will never die / it's such a fucked situation”.

There’s more lyrical punch where that came from. ‘big feelings’ is a biting clapback, but if only the no-holds-barred sentiments (“pussy so sweet a tear fell from his eye”) were matched by no-punches-pulled songcraft on a lacklustre, R&B-lite dirge. On the minimal electro of ‘like i do’ there is, again, a yawning gap between the screw-you sentiment (“no one fucks you like i do”) and the will-this-do? absence of melodic hooks.

Ariana Grande - petal (official visualizer) - YouTube

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There are the occasional uptempo moments. ‘oh well’ has a skippy, drum’n’bass beat, but not much in the way of chorus or vocal excitement. It takes the penultimate ‘bad thing (bunny hop)’, a zooming, Eighties synth-rock bop of the kind perfected by The Weeknd, to offer a flash of Grande the arena-filling, pop-bossing, Boca Raton bottle-rocket.

But overall, the feeling is of a woman all in her feels, but muffled in them. Or, in the words of a friend who’s a seasoned Ari-watcher and keeper-of-the-flame: “It feels like someone has been holding her at gunpoint in the studio, banning her from belting.”

As she sings on the opening ‘kiss me’, “Gimme something to love, gimme something overwhelming”. To which the only response after listening to these 12 tracks is: same, babes.