After 20,000 Ariana Grande fans fill up the O2 arena, so does the singer’s sparkling soprano – time and time again. During her mid-set rendition of ‘Break Free’, her club-ready collaboration with DJ-producer Zedd, the singer delivers a vocal run so stunning that it even smooths over the infamous grammatical inaccuracy in the lyrics: “Now that I’ve become who I really are“. It’s a reminder that Grande, now a relative veteran of eight studio albums and an Oscar nominee for Wicked, is one of her generation’s most gifted vocalists.
But Grande’s opening show in London on Saturday (August 15), the first in a 10-night residency that will wrap up her ‘Eternal Sunshine Tour’, is more than a vocal showcase. It’s also a dazzling expansion of the surreal, memory-erasing world from Grande’s 2025 short film Brighter Days Ahead, a companion piece to the singer’s spacey breakup album ‘Eternal Sunshine’, released a year earlier. The main stage is dominated by a giant house that becomes more decrepit and overgrown with flowers as the show goes on; if it’s haunted, the spectres are painful memories from the past. And the night ends sensationally, with Grande ascending to the rafters under an otherworldly beam of light – a nod to the film’s alien abduction scene.
When ‘The Eternal Sunshine Tour’ began in Oakland, California in June, it must have felt like a mic drop moment. But now, given that the singer’s team have said she will “take a step back from visibility” after her London run, amid increasingly intense scrutiny over her physical appearance, it feels darker and perhaps more pointed. Still, as psychologically intriguing as tonight’s show can be, it also works as a straight-up pop spectacle. Grande shows off her growing skills as a producer by looping her own vocals during ‘Eternal Sunshine’, brandishes a whip during a slinky ‘The Boy Is Mine’, and delivers spry choreography to her defiant house heater ‘Yes, And?’. Throughout the show, she skips across the stage in skyscraper heels that most drag performers would baulk at.
For much of the two-hour runtime, Grande’s setlist nimbly mixes gold-plated bops (2016’s dance-pop starburst ‘Into You’; 2019’s sleek R&B gem ‘Thank U, Next’) with vibey and sometimes less immediate deep cuts from ‘Eternal Sunshine’ and her latest album ‘Petal’, which dropped two weeks ago. The deftness of this blend really becomes apparent in the final section, when her new album’s clattering title track segues into the cathartic crowd-pleaser ‘We Can’t Be Friends (Wait For Your Love)’. Grande’s overall message tonight seems to fall somewhere between ‘Thank U, Next’ and ‘Yes, And?’. She’s doing business as usual until she boxes up her stage costumes in September.
There’s no revealing spiel about her upcoming break from the spotlight, only frictionless stage patter in which the singer thanks fans and professes her love for London, the city she called home while filming Wicked. For now, as a performer and a pop conceptualist, Grande has nothing left to prove.
Ariana Grande played:
‘Yes, And?’
‘Positions’
‘Dandelion’
‘The Boy Is Mine’
‘Eternal Sunshine’
‘Just Like Magic’
‘Thank U, Next’
‘7 Rings’
‘Imperfect For You’
‘Warm’
‘Safety Net’
‘One Last Time’
‘Rain On Me’
‘Break Free’
‘Twilight Zone’
‘Past Life’
‘Dangerous Woman’
‘Honeymoon Avenue’
‘Hampstead’
‘Into You’
‘Hate That I Made You Love Me’
‘Kiss Me’
‘Bad Thing (Bunny Hop)’
‘Petal’
‘We Can’t Be Friends (Wait For Your Love)’
‘Supernatural’
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