On “Past Life,” the penultimate track of “Eternal Sunshine Deluxe: Brighter Days Ahead,” Ariana Grande admits that she’s ready to move on from the divorce that cast a shadow over her seventh album. “Might fuck around and elevate my expectations,” she sings. “Now I’m fine to leave you in a past life.
” Grande has had many past lives — millions have seen them play out in real time — and the way that she confronts them is largely what made 2024’s “Eternal Sunshine” such a confessional epiphany. That album was her most insular and emotionally evocative to date, examining the pain of a very public divorce and the optimism of a very public new relationship. She named it after Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a 2004 film whose protagonists only realize the value of their romance while (literally) erasing it.
The film concludes on a cautiously upbeat note, suggesting that the hopefulness of new love could exempt you from the pain of past blunders — or doom you to repeat them. That inspiration was much of the charm of “Eternal Sunshine,” an album filled with songs aware of what went wrong and, subsequently, what’s going right. Grande is one of the more forthcoming pop stars we have, at least since 2018’s “Sweetener,” when she began using her music to process what she experiences in the public eye.
It’s placed her in a class of pop music’s most under-appreciated songwriters, consistently matching concept with .
