Ariana’s fourth album is her sweetest to date

AT SOME point in the process of listening to Ariana Grande’s fourth and most delightful album, Sweetener, which is slightly dominated by six songs produced and co-written by Pharrell Williams, it may occur to you: Well, of course she was going to hook up with the guy who made Happy one of the biggest hits of the decade. Grande has had a couple of venti-sized bitter teas to swallow in the last couple of years – a celebrity breakup and a bombing, in no particular traumatic order – so who better to go to, to make a record that’s sweet ‘n’ high?

Williams is not Grande’s only major enabler in this effort. She’s working again with the team of Max Martin and Ilya, who made significant contributions to her last album, 2016’s Dangerous Woman. It’s the Martin/

Ilya duo responsible for the two pre-release singles, No More Tears Left to Cry and God is a Woman. It’s a pretty effective tag-team approach Grande has going with these super-producers. The Swedes work on the really grandeiose songs that make a dance floor emote and sweat, and Pharrell does the smaller, quirkier, cooler tunes rife with stranger beats and giddier pleasures. Sweetener is nothing if not an embarrassment of state-of-the-moment production riches. That’s not all it is, thankfully.

Grande has kept a bit of a poker face, having come of age in an era where being a superstar diva doesn’t necessarily require forcing your heart out onto your sleeve. But without suddenly becoming a sob sister, she gets personal to just the right degree, co-writing a couple of songs that are overtly about clinical anxiety (Breathin’, Get Well Soon), and some others that are about prenewlywed bliss. And then there’s the fizz. Sweetener gives great fizz.

Generally, the weirder her new album is, the better. To wit: the Pharrell-helmed Borderline, which has a vintage Janet Jackson vocal feel, but also suggests Williams thought, “what the modern rhythm nation really requires is more cowbell”. Or the gonzo June single The Light is Coming, in which it was decided that it was not enough that Nicki Minaj did a pretty good opening guest rap, and that Grande kind of half-raps the rest of the song, over a weird hip-hop beat that only gradually seems to coalesce with everything going on in the tune; no, what it really needed was a sample of a guy berating the late Sen. Arlen Specter at a public meeting throughout the entire tune. You could find this annoying, but you’d be wrong: The Light is Coming is a laugh at the same time as it’s a genuine call to casting out darkness.

God is a Woman is, like the other Martin/ilya tracks, a little less odd.

You could mistake the chutzpah in God is a Woman for arrogance if it weren’t clear there’s something a bit tongue-in-cheek about its sexuality. There’s another moment on the album that you could wrongly take as an ego trip: Successful, in which Grande sings, “Yeah, it feels so good to be so young and have this fun and be successful.” This isn’t a dumb brag – it’s Pharrell trying to refocus the meaning of “success” and make it not a dirty word for young women.

If you dread pop songs with pointedly positive messages, Sweetener might have you rethinking that position. The album comes to a nice, nervously affirming close with Get Well Soon, which is Grande’s pep talk to herself, and to her similarly plagued fans, that this panic attack too shall pass. – Variety