Ariana Grande Drops Unreleased ‘Knew Better Part Two’ for ‘Dangerous Woman’ 10th Anniversary

Ten years later, and Ariana Grande is finally giving fans the song they never stopped asking for. The singer has released Dangerous Woman (Tenth Anniversary Edition), an expanded digital reissue of her landmark 2016 album — and it comes with the long-awaited unreleased track “Knew Better Part Two,” a fan-favorite that never made the original cut.

The 18-track edition is out now and features refreshed artwork alongside the full original tracklist. Vinyl editions are available to pre-order and will ship on May 29 — the same day Grande drops her new single “hate that i made you love me,” the lead track from her forthcoming eighth studio album, Petal, due July 31. It’s a lot of Ariana, all at once, and honestly? The timing feels intentional.

The anniversary also comes with some fresh hardware. The RIAA has newly certified Dangerous Woman 3x Platinum, while singles including “Side to Side,” “Into You,” “Dangerous Woman,” “Everyday,” and “Let Me Love You” have all received updated multi-platinum certifications. The album has now surpassed 25 billion global streams and over 20 million global units — staggering numbers for a record that debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 back in 2016. Six songs from the album have crossed one billion streams individually, with “Side to Side” (feat. Nicki Minaj) at 7.5 billion and “Into You” at 5 billion. “Side to Side” also made history as the first female collaboration to surpass one billion Spotify streams.

Why ‘Dangerous Woman’ Still Matters

It’s easy to look back at Dangerous Woman now and see it for what it was: the album that changed everything. At the time of its release, pop was in a transitional moment — Rihanna and Beyoncé were cementing their legacies with Anti and Lemonade, Drake and Justin Bieber dominated the charts, and the Chainsmokers were somehow everywhere. But no one was doing what Grande was doing. “Young Ariana run pop,” Nicki Minaj rapped on “Side to Side,” and even two years before Grande scored her first No. 1 single with “Thank U, Next,” that line rang true.

“Into You” remains one of the most undeniable pop songs of the past decade. Lorde said it best just days after the single dropped: “The first sentence, that ‘I’m so into you / I can barely breathe’ is like maybe the closest thing to pop perfection I’ve ever heard.” It’s hard to argue. The way Grande opens that song in almost a whisper, then builds it into something consuming and electric — that’s the kind of control that separates a good singer from an era-defining one.

Most of the album was built with Max Martin, Ilya Salmanzadeh, and Savan Kotecha, as well as Tommy Brown — and it marked the most involved Grande had ever been in the writing process up to that point, with credits on 10 of its 15 songs. The layered, airy harmonic arrangements that have since become her signature? They started here. So did her instinct for confessional storytelling that never feels overshared. “I just broke up with my ex” is the first lyric on “Let Me Love You.” Just a fact. No drama. That directness runs through everything she’s made since.

Kotecha told Rolling Stone back in 2019: “She’s now at the peak of her powers as a tastemaker, a songwriter. All the success she’s had, she’s learned from it all: What her voice is, what works for her. When the producer or engineer is not understanding what she wants from the vocal arrangement, she just goes, ‘Do you mind if I sit and do it?’ She’ll go into Pro Tools and fix it. She’s a master of the craft. I’ve been around some of the greatest singers of all time. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

What’s Coming Next for Grande

The anniversary edition arrives at a moment when Grande is firmly back at the center of pop culture. After lighting up movie screens worldwide in Wicked and the upcoming Wicked: For Good, she’s heading back on the road for the Eternal Sunshine tour — her first in six years — kicking off June 6 in Oakland. A new film alongside Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro, Focker-In-Law, arrives in November.

And then there’s Petal. About the record, Grande has said: “It’s definitely from a place where I have been maybe too shy or polite to tap into before. This kind of just feels like, fuck it.”

Which, if you know Dangerous Woman, sounds exactly right. That album was the first time she stopped being polite and started being a pop powerhouse. A decade later, she’s still following that same instinct — just further down the road she built herself.