My Everything

The debut album from Nickelodeon star-turned-pop force Ariana Grande, last year's Yours Truly, had charming qualities that also turned out to be unsustainable. Marked by the sort of puerile whimsy that can only really happen once a career, it split the difference between doe-eyed doo-wop and remember-the-'90s pop-R&B (the latter intentionally courting the ensuing Mariah comparisons). Grande proved just the type to pull off this sort of broad-stroked pastiche: she’s a theater kid at heart, slipping in and out of characters with practiced finesse (she’s got an arsenal of impressions on YouTube, from Britney Spears to a crying lamb). In a way, it was a risk—these sorts of throwbacks were, if not totally unfashionable, decidedly out of season.

But it was a calculated risk, one that blatantly positioned Grande as a wholesome, PG-rated alternative to the ratchet Mileys of the 2013 pop spectrum. Despite her obvious training—what more can be said about That Voice?—there was a pointed adolescence to Yours Truly, down to the eerily infantilized (and wisely scrapped) initial album art. And the Instagram-filter nostalgia, though pretty damn adorable, often rendered the project impersonal. Though it’s her calling card, Grande’s voice doubles as a weapon and a shield; amid all the puppy-love ballads, the album’s emotional centerpiece had her professing her undying love, not for a boy, but for a piano. And fittingly so: the emotional charge of Grande’s music comes from the rush of singing as an act, the clear delight she takes in the power of her own voice, moreso than whatever she’s actually singing about.

On My Everything, Grande ditches the manic-Disney-dream-girl ballads and goes straight for the bangers; while it may not be as consistent a statement as Yours Truly, it’s refreshingly grown-up. It’s no coincidence that the album’s two lead singles were produced by Max Martin, the guy who practically defined millennial pop bildungsroman and, 14 years ago, penned “Oops!…I Did It Again” and “Stronger” for a transitional Britney. They might be the year’s strongest one-two punch of singles: “Problem”, with its alluringly strange reverse-build-up (Grande’s howling pre-chorus primes us for an even bigger release, only to drop impishly into Big Sean whispers, mirroring the un-met expectations of the song’s bad-news boyfriend), and the Zedd-produced stomper “Break Free”, a colossal kiss-off that doubles as a “Stronger” for the EDM age. Grande’s side-step to the dancefloor feels pre-ordained, rather than a cash-out: “Break Free”’s festival-closing ambition perfectly pairs with her stadium-sized voice, and injects some much-needed femininity into EDM’s typical machismo.

Where Yours Truly was willfully off-trend, My Everything reveals a better understanding of “cool,” even if it occasionally misses the mark. Here, Grande exists gleefully in her own age, rather than gesturing vaguely towards a second-hand idea of “retro.” Even when the plinky soda-fountain sounds of her debut trickle back in, as on Cashmere Cat-produced “Be My Baby”, the effect is more Terius Nash than Pinterest-board pastiche. The features represent more grown-up choices, and coax some stunning performances out of typically middle-of-the-road guests: the Weeknd skulks out from the shadows and into the light on throbbing big-room ballad “Love Me Harder”, and A$AP Ferg delivers arguably his best guest spot ever on the Christina Aguilera-nodding sex jam “Hands On Me”.

It’s fitting that the two most sexually explicit songs on the album are some of its best; Yours Truly’s blinky innocence would’ve bordered on patronizing if carried on any longer. It’s bigger than sex-positivity, though—Grande’s directness in general is what's so refreshing. Where she once coyly avoided her crush’s gaze, here she stares him dead in the eyes with to-the-point come-ons like “May be a little thing, but I like that long.” In a recent New York Times feature, Grande says longingly, of the uphill battle against her squeaky-clean image, “Maybe one day I’ll get away with something naughty.” This certainly feels like a start.

Thanks to those chameleonic theater roots, Grande’s always been able to pull off rap crossovers better than peers like Katy Perry, but despite the handful of successful guest spots, her taste in rap features remains tragic. My Everything’s worst moments revolve around hokey appearances from serial cornballs Big Sean and Childish Gambino. The former drops clunker after clunker on “Best Mistake”, making a mockery of the song’s serious tone with hysterically awful lines like “How can we keep the feelings fresh/ How do we Ziploc it?” The latter takes the “he’s cheating… with a MAN!” storyline and rubs its face in its own feces with the beyond questionable punchline “Yes, I’m a G, from the A, and they ask Y” (get it, guys?)—as though the message wasn’t already made painfully obvious by the dorky, distracting “I’m Coming Out” sample running underneath Grande’s vocals. It's a bizarre choice for a singer whose occasional unintelligibility is already something of a meme.

Still, despite its missteps, My Everything feels like Grande’s arrival as a true pop fixture, not just a charming novelty. Where she once felt like an actor dutifully playing the part of blinky-eyed, malt-sipping romantic, here Grande slowly but confidently comes into her own; and while her personality may still take a backseat to her technical skill, it’s beginning to wink through the theatrics. Turns out, so-called mini-Mariah can hold her own in 2014; and while the best songs here may not be timeless, they certainly feel right for right now.