A year after her powerful Eternal Sunshine, Ariana Grande still can’t let go of the lingering romantic dreams and bitter nightmares she was exploring in those songs. In her self-described “really vulnerable concept album,” she set out to make her answer to the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, in a hazy psychedelic break-up suite of love and grief. But she keeps the story going in the extended version Eternal Sunshine Deluxe: Brighter Days Ahead, with a short film of the same title.
Eternal Sunshine was her sixth Number One album, with two Number One hits in “Yes And?” and “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love.” It also had the delightfully eccentric deep cut “Imperfect for You,” a guitar ballad that wasn’t even close to a hit, yet for some fans remains one of Ari’s career highlights. A great album all around — but she seemed to shy away from it as soon as she released it, almost as if she startled herself with how deep these songs went. She didn’t tour, avoided interviews, and backed all the way off pop stardom, pouring her energy into her other big project of 2024, the Hollywood blockbuster Wicked. You couldn’t blame her — somehow, it seemed like she felt safer in Oz than facing the heartache in Eternal Sunshine.
But she can’t seem to quit this story. Brighter Days Ahead offers five new songs continuing the Eternal Sunshine narrative, still haunted by the same memories. “Did I dream the whole thing?” she asks right off in “Twilight Zone,” the first of the new tracks. “Was I just a nightmare?” It’s a bittersweet synth-pop shimmer where she tries to talk herself into believing she doesn’t care any more — but it doesn’t work. “It’s not that I miss you, I don’t,” Grande sings. “Sometimes I just can’t believe you happened.”
She already tweaked the album with her Slightly Deluxe edition, adding remixes and duets (Mariah Carey, Troye Silvan), along with the superior Slightly Deluxe and Also Live, doing “The Boy Is Mine” alongside Brandy and Monica, plus seven live remakes with a 10-piece band. But these are genuine new songs that hit as hard as anything on the original album, produced by her core collaborators Max Martin, Ilya Salmanzadeh, and Oscar Törres, grieving the death of a relationship. “Why do I still protect you? Pretend these songs aren’t about you?” she asks in “Twilight Zone.” “Hope this might be the last one, because I’m not fooling anyone.”
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“Dandelion” is a fantastic swirl of jazzy horns and trap beats where she looks for new romance, trying to sow the seeds of love. Yet she still can’t shake off her memories. “Past Life” has spiky synth-strings as she sings about “waking up with a ghost,” no matter how sexy her dreams are. The Bowie-style “Warm” mixes hazy rock guitar and disco thump, as she sings about being “high in the exosphere,” safely frozen from human emotions. She gets a moment of escape in the piano finale “Hampstead,” in a London fling with a mysterious stranger. “I left my heart in a pub in Hampstead,” Grande sings. “And I misplaced my mind in a good way.”
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The short companion film also continues the story, revisiting Peaches, the heroine she plays in her video for “We Can’t Be Friends.” It’s written and directed by Grande herself with Christian Breslauer. Like the video, it takes off from Michel Gondry’s 2004 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Peaches gets her memories of lost love erased at the Brighter Days Inc. clinic. But for her, that doesn’t turn out to be the magic solution she was hoping for. As Ariana admits in “Hampstead,” “I would rather feel everything than nothing.”
There’s no happy ending on Brighter Days Ahead — she ends where she began, stuck in the twilight zone between mourning and forgetting. “I don’t remember too much of the last year,” she sings in “Hampstead.” (Probably not the only person you’ve heard say this lately.) “I’m still the same but only entirely different/And my lover’s just some lines in some songs.” Letting go is harder work than it seems, even when Grande’s turning her pain into music. But that’s what makes these songs — like the rest of Eternal Sunshine—reach so deep.
