Ariana Grande – Sweetner

By: Keegan Johnson

Ariana Grande-Butera, some of you remember her as the ditzy friend Cat Valentine from the Nickelodeon series Victorious, or from her debut album Yours Truly, or even when she held a benefit concert in Manchester after the horrible events that took place at her own show in Manchester. Nowadays Ariana Grande is one of the biggest pop stars in the world. With hit singles such as “The Way”, “Problem”, “Love Me Harder” along with many more.

With her new album Sweetener, Ariana brings more of what she does best to the table. Beautiful vocals, good production and new songs that will be charting on the Billboard Hot 100. The album opens with a short track that shows her vocals off. Then it goes right in to “blazed” with Pharrell Williams which is a solid track. This track’s production is very good being produced by Pharrell himself. Unfortunately, after this track we hit a small rough patch in the album with “the light is coming” and “R.E.M” I was not a fan of Nicki’s rapping and the beat during “the light is coming”. While “R.E.M” is not a terrible song, I was just not a fan of the production on this track.

The next track we get on the album I think is the second-best song on the whole album. “God is a woman” is a perfect blend of great production and great vocals from Ariana. I love the guitars that play as Ariana comes right in with her spot-on vocals. Once the beat starts to come in you hear a great drum kick come in and Ariana continues to kill it on this track. Right after this track we get another song that fell flat for me. “Sweetener” in my opinion is one of the worst tracks on this album. The song for me is very repetitive with the lyrics and just feels uninspired on this track. The next two tracks are good for the album with “successful” and “everytime”. Then we come to what I think is the best song on the album. “breathin” is a fantastic song with a great message behind it. Ariana’s vocals are at the forefront of the song and she delivers during the whole tracks runtime. I love the message behind it also, it is a simple but effective one. We have all been in a stressful situation where all we can do is just breath and remain calm. With Ariana saying, “just keep breathin, breathin, breathin,” I think she did a fantastic job of getting the message through the song. Unfortunately, the rest of the album fails to capture me the way “breathin” did. With the first single released off this album “no tears left to cry”, “borderline” “better off”, “goodnight n go”, “pete davidson”, “get well soon”. By no means are these tracks bad. I just wanted the album to go out in a better way.

As a whole, Sweetener is not a bad album. It’s an okay album that you can listen to once or twice but nothing more. I think that this album just needed to be more complete. There were too many tracks that fell flat for me and not enough tracks that stuck with me after I completed the album.

Rating: 6.5/10

Favorite songs: “God is a Woman”, “Breathin” “Blazed” (feat. Pharrell Williams)