Whether she’s singing about her exes or world-shaking tragedy, or both, Ariana Grande has always been an open-book superstar. But few expected the balladeering Barbarella to release a sixth album so explicitly about bonking. Clearly she’s been having a more eventful pandemic than most, though the warped MGM strings on Positions suggest that Grande, a lifelong Judy Garland fan, is blurring Pornhub and eroto-pop fantasy.
With her pleasure-seeking hubris leaving little to the imagination (well-fitting vaginas! cunnilingus!), perhaps it’s unsurprising that the production plays it fairly safe: Grande falls comfortably back on 90s-indebted, trap-speckled R&B, her voice breathy and gleaming. She does subtly twist up genre in places too though: the title track echoes Craig David’s garage shagathon 7 Days; there’s the disco-meets-new jack swing of Love Language; and My Hair undercuts a deeper, neo-soul sound with playful lyrics about her famous ponytail.
In some ways it’s a shame that Positions is overshadowed by all the sixty-nining: there is some proper soul-searching in Off the Table and Safety Net, duets with the Weeknd and Ty Dolla $ign respectively, and POV, her one-woman take on Brownstone. Grande laid bare may well be seen as a stopgap in her canon, using taboo to checkmate her past trauma, but it does pull off the rare feat of at least sounding effortless.
