dangerous woman

it was going to be called moonlight. the title changed late, and the change tells you what the record decided to be about — not softness, but appetite.

musically this is the widest net she had cast: a title track built on a blues guitar figure, house-adjacent dance songs, reggae-inflected pop, and a closing run of ballads that are among the best-sung things in her catalogue. the through-line is not genre, it is that every song is arranged to give the voice somewhere to go.

the era ended in the worst way imaginable, with the attack at the manchester arena in may 2017. what she did afterwards — returning within two weeks to stage the one love manchester benefit — reframed public understanding of her more than any record could, and the album that followed cannot be heard apart from it.