We’re only a month away from Ariana Grande’s seventh studio album, Eternal Sunshine, and she’s giving fans a taste of what to expect.
On Thursday, Ari posted a video to her Instagram page showing footage of her previewing songs from the upcoming album for executives at her label, Republic Records.
Standing before them nervously, Ari explains that she was keen to involve her team and everyone at Republic “as soon as possible because things are just pouring out and happening very quickly, as they often do.”
“You know how I am, and you know how these things go,” she says before giving some insight into the making of the album.
“We’re gonna do proper vocals and orchestrations in November,” she explains. “I wanted to share with you this...it’s kind of a concept album because it’s all different, like, heightened pieces of the same story, of the same experience.”
At this point in the introduction, Ariana looks to be fighting back tears. “I’m, like, weirdly emotional [because] I’ve been doing this for you guys for 10 years, 12 years,” she says before turning around and willing herself to “fucking pull it together, bitch.”
After managing to compose herself, she gets right back to her speech and informs the room that the “working” title for the album is Eternal Sunshine.
“I have nine songs I’m going to play, but 13 songs that are in the world,” she explains. “They’re enough that I wanted to bring my family in and play it for you guys so that we could all be thinking about what to do.”
And while we don’t hear any snippets of the music in the clip, Ari does tease that some of the tracks “are really vulnerable,” while others see her “playing the part that people kind of expect me to be sometimes, and having fun with that.”
Before she clicks play, Ariana shares that the album came together “pretty fast” over the fall while she had time off from shooting the Wicked movies amid the actors strike, which ended in November.
“When the strikes started, I came here and I did a week with Max [Martin] in September, and then I came every day by myself for a while. And then we did another week in October,” she says.
The video ends with clips of everyone in the room standing up and applauding as Ariana crouches on the floor, beaming and wiping away her tears with a tissue.
Now, if you’ve been following Ariana’s personal life in the past year, it’ll come as no surprise to hear that her upcoming album is going to be quite the emotional roller coaster.
In July, news broke that Ariana had split from her husband of nearly two years, Dalton Gomez. The exes filed simultaneous divorce petitions in September, both citing “irreconcilable differences.”
We haven’t heard a whole lot about the split, although Ariana did make references to “healing” in “Yes, And?” — the first single from her new album, which dropped to much fanfare on Jan. 12.
However, it’s safe to say that the biggest talking points from the new single were the apparent references to Ariana’s new boyfriend, Ethan Slater, and the allegations that the two of them engaged in an affair behind their respective partners’ backs last year.
For a quick reminder, Ethan and Ariana met on the Wicked set while they were both presumed to still be with their spouses. Just three days after Ariana’s divorce was announced, news broke that she and Ethan were reportedly dating, and within a week, he filed to divorce his wife, Lilly Jay, too.
The pair soon came under fire after a ton of reports claimed that they’d had an affair on the Wicked set. However, numerous sources close to Ariana and Ethan have denied the claims of infidelity, alleging that they began dating when they were both newly single.
The scandal reached peak messiness when Ethan’s estranged wife — with whom he welcomed a child in August 2022 — went on the record to publicly slam Ariana, saying she’s “not a girl’s girl.”
Right now, it seems that Ethan and Ariana are still together, although neither of them has publicly commented on the scandal.
Which brings us to January, when Ari seemed to casually brush off the cheating allegations on “Yes, And?,” singing the lines, “Your business is yours and mine is mine / Why do you care so much whose dick I ride?”
Within a matter of days after the song was released, Ariana was met with intense backlash and lost more than 350,000 followers on Instagram.
She hasn’t addressed the criticism — although it certainly kicked off her new music era with a bang.
