Ariana Grande’s fourth studio album Sweetener is out today, and while it’s upbeat enough to sound like a bubbly celebration of the pop star’s domestic bliss with SNL fiancé Pete Davidson, there’s a subtler — and darker — undertone to it. In addition to a handful of references to the dissolution of her last relationship with rapper Mac Miller, Grande’s latest work gets a sense of urgency from the way she’s coped since the bombing at her concert in Manchester last year. Most references to the bombing in the album are ambiguous, but the album ends with an explicit nod to the tragedy.
The 2017 incident — which killed twenty three, including the attacker, and left over a hundred people wounded, many of them children — unfolded during her...
