Hey y'all, DJ Louis here just dropping a snippet of the capstone to our Ariana Grande series where Bustles, Nolan Feeney and I are discussing her seventh studio album, Eternal Sunshine, which came out this past Friday. Nolan and I are digging into all of our thoughts on the new record, what's working, what's not, what is happening here, how Ariana is addressing all the fascination with our public narrative,

how the music advances, et cetera, et cetera. If you enjoy this snippet and you want to hear the rest

of this episode, you can go to patreon.com slash pop pantheon or click the link in the show notes

of this episode to subscribe, or you can subscribe for the audio only directly in the Apple Podcast

app. So here's that snippet.

In the late 2018 into 2019 moment of Sweetener into Thank You Next, there was this kind of perfect storm that created what I would describe as her imperial phase, which was sort of like

basically the Thank You Next single and then album run in which like there was this like

incredible coming together of like

utter fixation on her inner turmoil her public narrative Manchester Mac Miller's death

Pete Davidson's relationship and breakup and the way that that all came together into like

an artistic revelation on Thank You Next felt like just this really singular moment in her

career that she just kind of executed perfectly in pop star terms. Like it was just this moment where

like she used everything that was going on personally and then the way that we were viewing that

to sort of like take an artistic leap and find a real like singular voice and how she reacted to

all of that. And I think in some

ways, that has created expectations or a level of performance in those circumstances that has

affected this album cycle. And I think that sort of like particularly plays into the lead single,

Yes, and which came out a month and a half ago or so and I feel like has had a bit of like a mixed

reaction because of how well executed the thank you next moment was because here we are again

in another moment of tabloid controversial interest in Ariana's private life and you know she hasn't

come out looking particularly great to some of the

fans because, you know, I guess we can just summarize very quickly. She is in a relationship now with a guy that she met on the set of Wicked, Ethan Slater, and like, you know, due to internet sleuthing and whatever, we don't actually know the timeline of the whole thing, but like there seems to be a narrative that's coalesced that she's like basically like stolen this woman's husband.

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