skip to content
grande verse

grande verse / eras / dangerous woman

2016 · republic records · released 2016-05-20

dangerous womanariana grande’s 2016 album

the record that stopped asking permission

  • guitar-led pop
  • Max Martin
  • Ilya Salmanzadeh
  • Tommy Brown
Ariana Grande during the dangerous woman era
Dangerous Woman Tour 2/19/17 Emma · CC BY-SA 2.0 · credits

every one creative-commons licensed, credited under the frame, and listed on credits.

the story

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.

worth knowingthe album's lead single spent months being called an album cut by critics before becoming one of the most durable songs she has released.

why it looks like this

the only high-contrast era besides petal: near-black ground, a single hot red, hard corners and no grain. latex, spotlight, the visual grammar of the era's own photography.

the songs

the whole record, in order — all 15 tracks, with a preview on each. 9 of them have a full write-up here so far; the rest are listed with everything we can state as fact and nothing we cannot.

  1. Moonlight3:22
  2. Dangerous Woman#83:56
  3. Be Alright2:59
  4. Into You#134:04
  5. Side To Side feat. Nicki Minaj#43:46
  6. Let Me Love You feat. Lil Wayneno write-up yet3:44
  7. Greedy3:35
  8. Leave Me Lonely feat. Macy Gray3:50
  9. Everyday feat. Future3:15
  10. Sometimesno write-up yet3:47
  11. I Don't Careno write-up yet2:58
  12. Bad Decisionsno write-up yet3:46
  13. Touch Itno write-up yet4:20
  14. Knew Better / Forever Boyno write-up yet4:59
  15. Thinking Bout Youwhistle3:20

running order and previews from apple. released 2016-05-20.

around the same time

24 more recordings released alongside this era rather than on it — singles, features on other people’s records, deluxe cuts, soundtracks and christmas songs. every one with a preview and a way to go and hear it properly.

further reading

longer pieces on this, written to be checkable — every claim sourced and stamped with the date it was last verified.

everything in read →