Music

In a recent interview with the radio personality Zach Sang, Ariana Grande described the moment she and one of her writing collaborators first listened to part of the instrumental track that would become “34+35,” the second song on her new album, “Positions.” “We heard the strings that sounded so Disney and orchestral and full and pure,” she said. “And I was just like, Yo, what is the dirtiest possible, most opposing lyric that we could write to this?”They came up with an airy hook centered around that titular math problem, which adds up to a lascivious wink. (Nice.) Like the best songs on her previous album, “Thank U, Next,” “34+35” shares a light, inside-jokey intimacy with its listener; it’s full of Grande’s conspiratorial giggles and whispered secrets.But it also contains a few new flourishes: theatrical, plucked strings that do not evoke grandeur so much as the creep of mischievous cartoon characters; unapologetically and sometimes humorously libidinous lyrics; and occasional slips of vulnerability that reveal the giddiness and anxiety of new love.[embedded content]As the follow-up to the record that subtly reframed Grande’s persona and release strategy, “Positions” has some big Gucci tennis shoes to fill. The implicit argument of “Thank U Next” — a less polished and more quickly made album that Grande put out less than six months after her more carefully orchestrated 2018 LP, “Sweetener” — was that the meticulously planned, reflexively world-toured Big Pop Album had become too slow and impersonal a delivery system for a digital-era pop star to express herself with any semblance of authenticity or timeliness. This was particularly true for Grande, now 27, who endured two life-changing events in the months after “Sweetener” came out: the death of her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller, and the dissolution of her engagement to the comedian Pete Davidson.“My dream has always been to be — obviously not a rapper, but, like, to put out music in the way that a rapper does,” Grande explained in a December 2018 interview, while she was working on the album. It was a winningly reformist approach if not an outright revolutionary one: to turn the pop record into something more like a mixtape than a multiplatform corporate product launch — all the better to swiftly deliver songs that could seem like status updates.With its text-speak song titles and air of relative idiosyncrasy, “Positions” continues in that direction. But it also gestures toward Grande’s earlier, more traditional past. Its R&B leanings (like the twinkling, ’90s-nostalgic closer, “POV,” or the understated “West Side,” which samples Aaliyah’s “One in a Million”) imagine a more mature update of Grande’s 2013 debut, “Yours Truly.” “Off the Table,” a slinky, searching duet with the Weeknd, even name-checks their collaboration from Grande’s pop 2014 breakout “My Everything”: “I can love you harder than I did before.”“Positions” is Grande’s sixth album.While “Thank U Next” emphasized hip-hop cadences, “Positions” largely finds Grande exploring her full vocal range, from those whistle notes to the low croon she employs on “Safety Net,” a moody ballad in which she trades verses with Ty Dolla Sign. Both the Weeknd and Ty Dolla Sign collaborations, though, feel more like demure throwbacks, and show that Grande hasn’t quite figured out how to update her approach to balladry with the same fresh, personable energy that enlivens her more upbeat tunes.She fares better with a house beat (as on the weightless highlight “Motive,” which features production by Murda Beatz, or the disco-inflected “Love Language”), which allows her to capitalize on one of her breathy voice’s greatest strengths: its uncanny ability to make a song feel like it’s hovering just a few inches off the ground. The sumptuous manifestation anthem “Just Like Magic” makes this Good Witch energy explicit. “Middle finger to my thumb and then I snap it,” she sings — a clever lyric in the way it thwarts expectation by moving from saucy to sweet.“Positions” isn’t quite the reinvention that “Thank U Next” was, but it continues Grande’s effort to make the mainstream pop album a looser, weirder and more conversational space. Some of the credit for that atmosphere should also go to Victoria Monet and Tayla Parx, two of Grande’s closest friends, who have been writing with her since “Yours Truly.” On Grande’s most distinct songs, their bestie chemistry is palpable.Many pop stars attempt to take their sound to the next level by making increasingly grand and bombastic big-tent statements. Grande has succeeded largely by doing just the opposite: turning her music into an atmosphere as intimate as her bedroom, a place where she’s sometimes entertaining a lover but just as often cracking goofy jokes with her closest friends.Ariana Grande“Positions”(Republic) More

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When the country everybro Luke Combs released his album “What You See Is What You Get” a year ago, it became a streaming blockbuster — a rare trophy in Nashville, which has lagged behind most other genres in the shift to streaming.With “What You See Ain’t Always What You Get,” a reissued version of that album, Combs has proved just how much he has learned from pop and hip-hop stars in driving clicks online. The new version opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s latest chart, with the equivalent of 109,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen Music; about 70 percent of that total was derived from the album’s 102 million streams.Lesson 1: Give your album another shot on the charts with a “deluxe” version. Reissues with added songs have become hip-hop’s most effective new gimmick, used by Lil Baby, Lil Uzi Vert, Nav, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie and others to extend the sales streaks for recent LPs. The new version of “What You See” has six tracks that were not on the original album.Lesson 2: Promote on TikTok. Again and again. Combs has two million followers on the bite-size video app, which has become the industry’s most reliable hit generator, whether that means Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” or Fleetwood Mac’s 43-year-old “Dreams.” Combs has been seeding the new version of “What You See” on TikTok for months, posting versions of his new songs, including “Forever After All,” which this week also opens at No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, just behind Ariana Grande’s brand-new “Positions.”Those tactics helped Combs get the most streams of any country album in a week, breaking the record he set last year. For a sense of just how far country music has come with streaming, before Combs, that record was held by Gene Autry — who died in 1998 but whose album “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Other Christmas Classics” had racked up 44 million streams during the 2018 holiday season.In addition to streams, “What You See” sold 22,000 copies as a complete package, and in an era of cratering single sales, songs from the album sold a remarkable 109,000 copies on download stores like iTunes.Also this week, Bruce Springsteen’s “Letter to You,” his first new album with the E Street Band in six years, opened at No. 2 and the rapper Ty Dolla Sign started at No. 4 with his new LP, “Featuring Ty Dolla Sign.”Two posthumous rap albums that have been steady hits since July continue to hold strong on the chart, with Pop Smoke’s “Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon” at No. 3, and Juice WRLD’s “Legends Never Die” at No. 5. More