The long awaited album, Sweetener, by Ariana Grande has caused a mixed public reaction especially from Arianators deriving from her Dangerous Woman Era. It’s no question that the Dangerous Woman album blessed the world with “Into You” and “Thinking About You”. The diversity of the sounds and lyrics in that album made it enjoyable by a large audience and gained a large sum of Ariana’s fan base. With that being said, the Dangerous Woman album set a very high merit within the minds of her fanbase, and as a result many Ariantors believed that Sweetener was going to be Dangerous Woman II. Despite Ariana herself saying that this album was going to be very experimental, her fans still held the illusion that the Dangerous Woman Era was going to continue.

Once Sweetener was released the fan base was split between open-minded fans and Dangerous Woman fanatics. However, the common ground was the second half of the album with “breathin” and “everytime” acting as a uniting force between both sides of the fandom. However, this was not the only universal opinion on the album. Many fans agreed that the albums opening song “raindrops (an angel cried)” should have been a lot longer than the 38 second tease that Ariana decided to publish. Along with this critic, another one that frequently came to surface was the repetitiveness of a large sum of her songs from “the light is coming” all the way to the albums main song “sweetener”. Since “sweetener” was the long awaited, main song of the album, it received the most ridicule with people frequently comparing the songs beat with that of a nursery rhyme. The only other song that matched the “sweetener” publicity was the fourth song on the album– “R.E.M.”.

Once the Beyhive (Beyoncé’s fan base) started listening to Ariana’s album they froze once their phones came to Ariana’s fourth song on the album– “R.E.M”. This shock came from the fact that this song has been sung before in an unreleased demo called “Wake Up” by Beyoncé. Pharrell Williams produced the demo with Beyoncé, but never publicly released it and it only surfaced on the internet due to a demo leak. However, once R.E.M. was released the Beyhive accused Ariana of stealing Beyoncé’s demo which raised publicity towards Beyoncé’s demo “Wake Up”. This lead to a constant comparison between the two and even some mashups of both versions.

Overall, Ariana’s album Sweetener wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but not everyone likes their tea sweet.