• Ariana Grande, 32, released “Hate That I Made You Love Me” on May 29 — the lead single from her upcoming eighth studio album Petal, due July 31 via Republic Records — co-written and produced by Grande alongside longtime collaborators Ilya and Max Martin
• The mid-tempo song carries a dual meaning: on the surface it reads as a breakup track about a lost love who felt more invested than she did, but the bridge expands into a meditation on fame and the expectations placed on women in the public eye — “Is it really my fault you all gave me your hearts on your own accord?” she sings
• An official music video directed by Christian Breslauer — who helmed Grande’s MTV VMA-winning Bright Days Ahead short film in 2025 — premieres Monday, June 1 at 8 a.m. PST; a teaser featuring Weapons actor Justin Long dropped earlier this week
• Petal is described by Grande as “little feral” and “from a place I’ve been maybe too shy or polite to tap into before” — the 12-track album was executive produced and co-written by Grande and Ilya, who has worked with her since her 2014 breakout single “Problem”

Ariana Grande has officially opened a new chapter. “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” the lead single from her forthcoming eighth studio album Petal, arrived Friday, May 29 — and with it, the clearest signal yet of where the 32-year-old is heading musically and emotionally after two years of high-profile film projects, a divorce, and a seven-year gap between major tours. The song is built around a shimmering, ambient instrumental, Grande’s voice in a quieter register than much of her previous work, and a premise that sounds like an apology but isn’t really one, per Rolling Stone.

“Hate that I made you love me / Sorry if I made me your type / Yeah, I hate that I made you love me / ‘Cause I barely tried,” she sings in the chorus. The song was co-written and produced by Grande alongside Ilya and Max Martin — the same Swedish production team behind many of her biggest records. It arrives with a comic-book-inspired lyric video and is listed as the second track on Petal. It’s also Grande’s first non-soundtrack single since 2025’s “Twilight Zone,” per Billboard.

Speculation about who the song is directed at began immediately. Just Jared noted that on Eternal Sunshine, Grande sang about how hard she worked to sustain a relationship — and that this song flips that script entirely, with the narrator claiming she “barely tried.” Some fans have drawn a connection to her divorce from Dalton Gomez. Others read the song as addressing something bigger: the experience of being a public figure whose image becomes a projection screen for everyone who encounters it. Grande doesn’t resolve the ambiguity, and that seems intentional, per Just Jared.

The Bridge Changes Everything

The element of the song that has generated the most conversation is the bridge, which pivots away from the romantic framing entirely. “I felt your projections when you felt so insecure / Tell me why is it this way, why you so hate to see women endure / Is it really my fault you all gave me your hearts on your own accord / I don’t really think so,” she sings. ELLE’s analysis of the lyrics noted that the bridge transforms what appears to be a breakup song into something more pointed — an address to the audience itself, to fans and critics alike who have assigned their own meanings to Grande’s persona over the years. That reading fits with what Grande has said about Petal more broadly: it’s an album going somewhere she hasn’t let herself go before, per ELLE.

The closing lines — “I know that I will find my way from you / Like flowers from a tomb while you decide who you are” — land as both a breakup sign-off and a statement of self-possession. The album title suddenly makes more sense. Petal: something that pushes through, fragile and insistent at once, per Pitchfork.

What We Know About Petal

Grande first announced Petal via Instagram on April 28, describing the 12-track set as “little feral.” “It’s definitely from a place I’ve been maybe too shy or polite to tap into before,” she said in a video. “This kind of just feels like something that is full of life and growing through the cracks of something cold and hard and challenging.” The album is the follow-up to Eternal Sunshine — her Grammy-winning 2024 record — and is executive produced and co-written by Grande and Ilya. Ilya, the Swedish producer behind some of the biggest pop records of the past decade, has been Grande’s closest studio collaborator since “Problem” put her at the top of the charts in 2014. His fingerprints are audible throughout “Hate That I Made You Love Me” — the production is controlled, precise, and built to let Grande’s voice carry the emotional weight, per Variety.

The Music Video and the Tour

Before the single even dropped, Grande had already teased the official music video with a clip featuring Justin Long — the actor currently in Weapons — peering into a car’s rearview mirror as a trap-adjacent beat builds, only to see Grande’s eyes staring back at him. The teaser’s visual language, Billboard noted, evokes the poster design of the 1986 thriller The Hitcher. The full video, directed by Christian Breslauer — who also directed the MTV VMA-winning Bright Days Ahead short film for Grande in 2025 — premieres June 1 at 8 a.m. PST. Long’s appearance continues what Billboard described as Grande’s longstanding tradition of casting recognizable actors in her visual projects, per Billboard.

The single arrives just as Grande is about to head back on the road. Her Eternal Sunshine concert tour — her first major tour in seven years — kicks off in June, meaning fans will be hearing these new songs live almost immediately after they land. Petal drops July 31, squarely in the middle of the touring run. The timing is deliberate: Grande is not easing into this era. She’s releasing the music while she’s in front of the biggest live audiences of her career, and “Hate That I Made You Love Me” is the opening argument.

The post Ariana Grande Launches the ‘Petal’ Era With New Single ‘Hate That I Made You Love Me’ — Here’s What the Lyrics Mean appeared first on Cream.

• In a new Variety cover story, Cynthia Erivo, 39, speaks candidly about the November 2025 incident at the Wicked: For Good Singapore premiere, when she pushed away a man who had jumped a barricade and grabbed Ariana Grande — Jonathan Wen was subsequently jailed for nine days and banned from Singapore
• The viral aftermath — memes and TikTok videos casting Erivo as Grande’s "bodyguard" — left her feeling her humanity was "bastardized": "It was my physique; it was my shape; it was the fact that I was bald; it was about what I looked like," she says
• "I think that we haven’t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view Black women," Erivo says; "I would hazard a guess that it would not have been the same had it been the other way around"
• She says the experience killed her motivation to campaign for a second Best Actress Oscar nomination for Wicked: For Good, which was ultimately shut out of the 2026 Academy Awards entirely
• On a possible Wicked 3: "It’s too soon to even begin to have the conversation about it. It would take a lot to get me back to do it. It has to make sense"; she and Grande still text almost every day

Cynthia Erivo has spent months sitting with what happened in Singapore, and now she’s ready to say what she thinks it was really about.

In a Variety cover story published Wednesday, Erivo gives her most detailed account of the November 2025 incident at the Wicked: For Good Singapore premiere — and goes further, connecting the viral fallout to something she says the public hasn’t wanted to confront. At the event, a man named Jonathan Wen vaulted over a barricade and grabbed Ariana Grande on the red carpet. Erivo stepped in immediately.

"Nobody moved. Nobody moved," she recalls. "So I moved because my brain went, ‘Get him away! Get him out of here!’ My immediate reaction was ‘Get him away from us.’ And what people couldn’t see is that he wouldn’t let go [of Grande]. He wouldn’t let go. So I just kept pushing at him to get him off." Wen was jailed for nine days and banned from Singapore for the incident.

Most coverage praised her instincts. But a parallel narrative ran alongside it: memes, jokes, and TikTok videos casting Erivo as Grande’s "bodyguard" — playing on the physical contrast between the two women. Erivo is direct about what she saw in those videos.

"I think that we haven’t really come to terms with the insidious nature of how we view Black women," she tells Variety. "And I’m sure people will read this and think, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, it’s not about that.’ But it is. Because that’s what was being made fun of. It was my physique; it was my shape; it was the fact that I was bald; it was about what I looked like. And because of that, there was this assumption that I was bigger than my co-star and so I had to be controlling or protecting, and that was my role. I would hazard a guess that it would not have been the same had it been the other way around."

How It Affected the Oscars

Erivo says the incident and its aftermath took the wind out of her willingness to campaign for a Best Actress nomination for Wicked: For Good. She had already received a nomination for the first film; the sequel, which completed the $1.2 billion two-film franchise, received no Oscar nominations at all.

"I just felt like my humanity had been bastardized," she says. "I felt like something I did instinctively had been made to be something that it simply was not because of the way people see women who look like me, and because of the assumptions that are made, and I just didn’t want to be a part of that, really and truly. I didn’t want to put myself through it. I didn’t feel like I deserved it."

She adds that the season was already colored by what she perceived as a "sort of upturned nose at the second installment, even though we all knew there was a second film coming and we were just doing our jobs." Per Us Weekly, Erivo also noted the toll of the Oscar campaign window itself: "If it was a shorter stint of time, there is less potential for things to turn sour, and also there’s more energy to keep it going."

On her friendship with Grande, she says it has survived everything. "I think that people didn’t really believe that we were actually friends," she says. "But that’s also because people don’t know me very well. If I’m a friend, then I’m a friend. If I’m not, then I’m not." The two still text almost every day.

What Comes Next

Erivo is currently starring in Dracula, a one-woman show at the Noël Coward Theatre in London in which she plays 23 characters and delivers roughly 20,000 words of dialogue over two hours. She’s also announced her next film role: The Road Home, in which she’ll play South African singer and civil rights activist Miriam Makeba.

The roles she’s dreaming about after that? A monster for Guillermo del Toro, and Storm from the X-Men, which she calls "a childhood fantasy of mine."

As for Wicked 3: "It’s too soon to even begin to have the conversation about it," she says. "It would take a lot to get me back to do it. It has to make sense."

The post Cynthia Erivo Says the ‘Bodyguard’ Memes After She Protected Ariana Grande Were About Race — and They Killed Her Oscar Drive appeared first on Cream.

• Ariana Grande has released a Tenth Anniversary Edition of Dangerous Woman, featuring the previously unreleased fan-favorite “Knew Better Part Two.”
• The 18-track digital edition is out now; new vinyl editions are available to pre-order ahead of a May 29 release.
• The RIAA has newly certified Dangerous Woman 3x Platinum, and the album has surpassed 25 billion global streams.
• Grande’s new album Petal arrives July 31, with lead single “hate that i made you love me” dropping May 29.
• Her Eternal Sunshine tour kicks off June 6 in Oakland — her first tour in six years.

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.

The post Ariana Grande Drops Unreleased ‘Knew Better Part Two’ for ‘Dangerous Woman’ 10th Anniversary appeared first on Cream.