eternal sunshine deluxe: brighter days ahead

The 2025 reworking of Ariana Grande’s lightly conceptual seventh album appends six tracks to its predecessor—and, perhaps crucially, a notable do-over. “intro (end of the world) [extended],” the first of the new cuts, starts simply enough as a reprise of the existential lullaby that opens the original album. But its longing is cut off at the knees when Grande begins describing her desire to “jump into your skin and change your eyes” so she can provide a kind of turbo-charged empathy that reveals the relationship’s darker side. While its pillow-soft sonics and Grande’s resolute singing are gentle, it’s still a jarring lyric to hear right after the album proper’s closer, “ordinary things,” on which Grande's nonna Marjorie tells her granddaughter in no uncertain terms about the signals that a relationship is over. Nonna spoke, Grande listened, that book is closed. Or is there even a book in the first place? When discussing the beat-forward, hit-packed eternal sunshine with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe around its initial release in 2024, Grande said, “Finding a home in eternal sunshine was a lovely costume to wear,” noting that the “freedom within art” was present because of the endless possibilities for sources—personal truths, films (like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the surrealistic love story that provides the album’s title), high concepts. With the release of Wicked, Ariana's big-screen coming-out party in late 2024, Grande had reached new heights of celebrity—and with that newfound status, her personal life was under further scrutiny. Over the rest of brighter days ahead, Grande is playfully opaque, making a reference to “holding space” on the simmering “warm,” which turns Grande’s vocals into a neon-lit cloud settling over glossy synth skyscrapers, and declaring “I’m still the same but only entirely different” on “Hampstead,” a reimagining of the barroom-piano-led last-call lament. That’s only one spot where Grande’s voice pushes into exciting new territory: “dandelion,” a lusty expression of desire, spins out of a drowsy trumpet line, its looped horn and sampled trap drums adding heat. “Might fuck around and elevate my expectations,” Ariana muses on the chorus of “past life,” a low-lit synth-R&B cut. As with her other releases, brighter days ahead shows how her attention to detail and desire to evolve have resulted in a singular body of work that, even if it’s playing coy about where the public Grande ends and the private Ari begins, is utterly her own.