Petal      Artist: Ariana GrandeLabel: RepublicThe release of Ariana Grande’s eighth studio album, Petal, has been overshadowed by her announcement she is “taking a step back from visibility” following the conclusion of her current tour.The paradox is that as a recording artist – rather than as a celebrity and actor – she never seemed fully in the spotlight in the first place, and her music has always had an enigmatic and diffuse quality, as though transmitted to us from the far side of the looking glass. She herself is everywhere. But her recorded output has long felt like an elusive byproduct of her fame and has been difficult to get a handle on. Everyone knows what Grande looks like. Yet in a pinch, how many could hum the chorus to one of her hits?Grande is at her most cryptic and intangible on Petal. This LP deals with heavy subjects like heartache and career burnout yet muffles those emotions under layers of synthetic bass and ratchets up the weirdness with its runs into glitched-up r’n’b. As midwifed by producer Ilya Salmanzadeh (who also worked with Grande on 2024’s Eternal Sunshine), Petal is more the ghostly outline of a pop record rather than something so dull and straightforward as a major label release laden with hits. It’s all shadow-play and mystery, an effect rooted in Grande’s vocals and their default register of bird-like notes mixed with a breathy angst.Is she happy? Sad? Empowered? Imprisoned within a gilded cage of fame? She has described Petal as powered by “unfiltered rage”. But her voice has little of what we’d recognise as anger in the conventional sense. If her singing conveys any readily identifiable emotion – often it does not – it is that she is haunted by the restless spirits of the stardom she is seeking to escape.The backdrop to Petal is the onslaught of attention she has received as co-star of the Wicked movies – which spawned endless internet “discourse” about her singing, appearance, interview style and every other aspect of her public persona. She has internalised these experiences and, on Petal, poured them into gothic R’n’B above which her vocal flutters as though she were dialling into the studio via a Ouija board.The spirit of Wicked hangs around opener Kiss Me, which pairs the epic heft of a big musical number with lyrics that chronicle her lack of self-worth in the aftermath of a romantic break-up (“Gimme something to love ... something to just obsess me”).This is a record paved with heartbreak. Much of it is presumably a consequence of her split from her Wicked co-star and boyfriend of three years, Ethan Slater (“Boq” in the movie). Hate That I Made You Love Me is one of the more biographical tunes and is distinguished by stripped-down production (there are vague hints of piano: something tinkling this way comes) that makes it feel as if it’s always 4am in Grande’s world. And yet the chorus is uncharacteristically specific, with Grande lamenting the tendency to filter one’s personality to make yourself more amenable to a love interest (“sorry if I made me your type”).Cover art for Petal by Ariana Grande. [ Ariana Grande to take ‘a step back’ from public life due to ‘endless, ongoing scrutiny’Opens in new window ]If this diffuse LP has a heart, it’s the title track Petal, where she casts herself as a lost soul brought low by too much work and numbed by the pressure of fame (“trying to feel so real”). Again, for a big league pop star, the song is strikingly wonky. Grande’s singing seems to be fighting against walls of skittering electronic production that recreate the effect of an artist struggling for breath.With the possible exception of Lana Del Rey, it’s difficult to think of another A-list musician so indifferent to the conventions of how a pop star should sound. Yet while Del Rey has a definitive aesthetic, Grande refuses to be pinned down. She pivots into high-tempo garage on Oh Well. Here, the blur of beats offering an uneasy contrast with her lilting delivery, which feels as if it has beamed in from a different song entirely – and yet somehow meshes perfectly with the tune’s bristling energy. But she torches everything to the ground and builds it up from scratch on the slow burner Never Get Over Me, which pairs a jazzed-up lilt with a voice that hums with a knowing lilt.There are occasional concessions to pop convention. The brassy Big Feelings has an actual chorus and sounds like Grande doing a decent impression of The Weeknd’s Michael Jackson maximalism. Otherwise, Petal never quite blooms and is content to ebb along in a sort of ethereal funk, an R’n’B Enya lost in a void of ennui.Grande may have had enough of media intrusion. But as an artist, she seems bulletproof to public opinion, and with her new album she sets out a singular worldview with a defiance all too unusual in the world of mainstream pop. The rage she talks about is never front and centre. Instead, it hums in the background, a weather front rumbling way off but filling the air with its raw, unprocessed fury. If Wicked put her on the yellow-brick road to tabloid hell, with Petal she claws back her agency and delivers a flowering inferno of angst and introspection.[ Ireland has become a colder house for artists like Glen HansardOpens in new window ]