sweetener

the two halves

this is the structural fact about the record and most reviews of it at the time treated it as a problem. the pharrell tracks — blazed, the light is coming, r.e.m., sweetener, borderline — are rhythmically strange, deliberately unresolved, and built with holes left in them. the max martin tracks — no tears left to cry, god is a woman, breathin, no more tears to give — are enormous and finished.

put next to each other they sound like two records, and that is the honest description. it is also what makes the album interesting a decade on: an artist at the peak of her commercial power spent half of a major-label album on arrangements that do not resolve, and then released the other half as singles so the first half could exist.

what it is about

the year after manchester, without pretending recovery is a straight line. the two most direct tracks on it — get well soon and breathin — are about anxiety and about not being able to breathe, and they are not metaphors. the record's whole proposition is in its title: something added to make a thing bearable, which is not the same as the thing being fine.

the singles

• no tears left to cry. the comeback single, and one of the very few pop records that changes tempo and key in the first twenty seconds and gets away with it.
• god is a woman. the one with the video everybody remembers, and a live vma performance with fifty dancers.
• breathin. the one that has quietly outlasted both of them with listeners, because it is about a panic attack and says so.
• the light is coming, with nicki minaj. the most divisive thing she has released. it is a loop, a shout and almost no chorus, and it was released as a single anyway.

the grammy, and the ceremony she skipped

it won best pop vocal album at the 61st ceremony in february 2019 — her first grammy, from what is now twenty nominations and three wins. she did not attend, after a public disagreement with the producers about what she would perform. thank u, next had come out two days earlier, which gives the whole episode a shape nobody planned.

how it holds up

better than it was received. the pharrell half was called unfinished in 2018 and now reads as the most distinctive production on any of her records; the singles have not aged at all. it is also the last album made before the release schedule went strange — six months later there was thank u, next, and the two of them belong to each other in a way neither was designed for.