Eternal Sunshine remains this year’s saturn return album to beat

As 2024 finds us in a sea of pop stars reckoning with their respective quarter-life crises, ponytail’s no-filler magnum opus still rises to the top.

Sep 10, 2024

“You can only pick one!” The statement is confident and assured, stressed by a friend at a Brooklyn bar over Labor Day weekend while a group of us toast to the twilight of a long and fraught summer. Naturally, my friends and I are discussing an age-old question: “What’s your album of the year?” Less what will be crowned Album Of The Year at the upcoming Grammys, more who, for us, has captured our ever-shrinking attention spans for the better part of 2024. The question, like most presented at drinks with friends, is simply an entry point, offering us a chance to further connect by choosing (and often defending) our favorite music. For me, the answer was simple: “Eternal Sunshine,” Ariana Grande’s sweeping ode to the Saturn return.

Like the great musical years before it (2016 I’m looking at you), 2024 will be remembered for incredible offerings from our favorite artists. This year, most work finds our pop girlies treading similar Saturn return waters. Coined “astrological puberty,” this infamous period is when it’s time to clean house as Saturn returns to where it was at the moment of your birth, or it’s time to “wake up and smell the coffee,” as Scottish astrologer Diana Garland states on “saturn returns interlude.” Eternal Sunshine is a reflection of Grande’s own Saturn return, coming after an almost four-year break from new music, a period filled with intense public interest in her personal life amid a very public divorce.

It’s a time-old reflection, but an important one nonetheless: to move forward, we must look back. If there is any hope of healing, we must assess the damage.

“How can I tell if I’m in the right relationship?” It’s a simple question, the one Ari asks at the top of the album. Rather than boldly define the journey we’re about to embark on, “intro (end of the world),” barely clocking in at 1:38, gently calls us in. “Aren’t you really supposed to know that shit? Feel it in your bones and own that shit? I don’t know.” It’s a time-old reflection, but an important one nonetheless: to move forward, we must look back. If there is any hope of healing, we must assess the damage.

The strength of “intro” is how it honors these questions, the wondering and wandering of a life filled with “what ifs.” This isn’t new territory for Grande. In fact, it’s a theme she’s all but perfected over the years. Look to “Thank U Next,” her lightning-in-a-bottle single that saw her acknowledging her exes with kindness (and finding true healing from having loved and lost). That Ariana turned out amazing, finally finding enough distance from her pain to squeeze those lemons into some decent lemonade.

While she kicked off that era by calling out her exes by name (literally), somehow, Eternal Sunshine is much more specific and nuanced emotionally than anything she’s put out prior, bravely diving into the wreckage of a past relationship and shining a light on the good and the bad, excavating the darkest parts to move forward into the light. Take “Eternal Sunshine,” the slick track 5 that, if handled by another artist, might feel far more accusatory. I mean, she quite literally croons, “hope you feel alright when you’re in her” on the hook, and yet, the song is an incredibly balanced (and fair) assessment of a relationship that simply didn’t work out. As she says, now he’s her eternal sunshine.

Naturally, the album is inspired by and in a considerable amount of communication with 2004’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” The science fiction film explores separation in an incredibly heightened way, following characters who have the chance to erase someone from their lives. Literally. All it takes is one quick procedure and they can zap those pesky memories out of their brains, finally feeling happy again and happy for good. Eternal sunshine.

The outro of the song’s chorus serves as a centerpiece for the entire album. “Won't break, can't shake. This fate, rewrite. Deep breaths, tight chest. Life death, rewind.”

This title track re-examines and recontextualizes the themes presented in the film, detailing the replays in our minds when looking back on relationships. When did it really go south? Who was right? Who was wrong? How did we go from lying next to each other to lying with someone else? Again, honoring questions without necessarily offering (or needing to) answer them.

The outro of the song’s chorus serves as a centerpiece for the entire album. “Won't break, can't shake. This fate, rewrite. Deep breaths, tight chest. Life death, rewind.” A rather catchy and simple mantra, this section stopped me dead in my tracks at first listen. This psychological lather, rinse, and repeat, is familiar in its specificity. When untangling from any meaningful person, an old love, even a friend, we process this way. In small bits, information is rearranged and rewritten in the wake of devastating loss. Anything can trigger a response like this: an anniversary, a shared saying, a meal, a forgotten memory. Long after you have parted ways, these little things remain.

And amid all of that loss and confusion, life rolls on. New loves are found and new experiences are had. Tracks like “supernatural” give us the sexy and promiscuous Grande, if not more assured than ever. Take “true story” into “the boy is mine,” a one-two punch of the powerful “dangerous woman” Ari we’ve all come to know and love, but with full control of the wheel this time. Amid incessant media speculation around her, she invites this bad girl persona often weaponized against her, daring the object of her affection (and in turn, us) to treat her as the villain she’s been painted to be. It offers a thrilling look at living and loving in the public eye, while never losing sight of the universality of heartache.

Then we get to “we can’t be friends (wait for your love),” perhaps her greatest offering yet, and the album’s emotional peak. Much has been made of this glistening, Robyn-esque dancefloor anthem. From first listen, it’s an immediate addition to the pantheon of “get in girls, we’re crying and dancing at the club” tracks, with its cryptic lyrics leaving plenty of room for interpretation.

In a musical landscape where almost every pop offering and their respective fandoms are accustomed to self-mythologizing, this approach is a breath of fresh air.

Is it a simple break-up song about missing your love and yearning for closure? Is it a dissection of the dissolution of her marriage? Perhaps the most interesting take on the track, is that it is about her relationship with us, the public. A lyric like “You cling to your papers and pens, wait until you like me again,” certainly helps add some credibility to this theory. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The song achieves exactly what perfect pop music should earn: it leaves just enough room to mean whatever we want it to mean. In a way, it’s ours now.

In a musical landscape where almost every pop offering and their respective fandoms are accustomed to self-mythologizing, this approach is a breath of fresh air. Insert any pop girl’s name and you’ll find tweets, essays, and commentary on who their latest album is about, when and how relationships did or didn’t work out and why. Eternal Sunshine’s greatest achievement, despite massive public commentary beforehand, is how she skirts around all of this, somehow creating her most personal body of work while maintaining a perfect amount of distance, allowing the listener to meet her halfway, filling in the blanks with our own stories.

Then comes the devasting “I wish I hated you” an emotional comedown after “we can’t be friends.” Perhaps Ariana’s most vulnerable track in her entire discography, it finds her sitting in the wreckage of a finished relationship, rummaging through not only all that was lost, but all of the love that remains, and may remain still. So often, these endings don’t play like our favorite films. These feelings aren’t black and white. It’s not always just the end of an act, and a day when you are “finally okay” may not be just on the horizon. The “break up, mourn and then bam, one day you’re grateful cycle” is the perfect storytelling structure, as our favorite early 2000s romcoms so often remind us. But in real life, especially as we grow and experience it, it’s not always that way. These feelings can, and do often go unresolved.

Eternal Sunshine is a release, yes, but a controlled one. It’s an exercise in restraint, without compromising her self-expression. It’s about purging what does not serve you while holding onto what did, even the painful moments that often shape us.

Sometimes separation can lead to hate. But more often than not, as Ariana so delicately examines, you don’t hate at all, even if the hating would perhaps be easier. We may always wish for one more moment, one more chance to truly say how we feel and declare what this person means to us. How powerful then for Ariana, again, deftly keeping the specifics to herself, to let us into the pain of that reality on this track. At her most tender, it’s a stirring ballad that leaves room for it all: the guilt, the hurt, the loss, the happiness, the healing, the remorse, and yes, the love. When the final admission of, “I wish I hated you,” comes, you can’t help but exhale along with her.

Eternal Sunshine is a release, yes, but a controlled one. It’s an exercise in restraint, without compromising her self-expression. It’s about purging what does not serve you while holding onto what did, even the painful moments that often shape us. Grande alluded to this in her interview with Zane Lowe, opening up about how while working with Max Martin on the album, he helped her navigate just how personal she got on the final version of the record that ultimately made its way to us. In an alternate universe, there’s another version of this album that cuts deeper and has more headline-pulling lines and call-outs, one that I’m sure would have had some instant gratification for her and her fandom. And yet, with Eternal Sunshine’s devastatingly beautiful balancing act, Grande achieves something greater, offering us all a path to heal on our own terms.

Let’s get this out of the way: my perspective and position (mhm) in life are important in the context of my love of this album. I am, in fact, 29, just a few years younger than Grande and deep in my own Saturn return. Reckoning with my journey so far, love lost, paths chosen and not, the “what ifs” of life seem to be forever front of mind, for myself and for my peers. In the wake of beautiful triumphs and immense loss, I am coming to terms with the fact that I am truly unmoored, facing the end of an impactful and defining decade. At this turn, I am both overwhelmed by what has come to pass and unsure of what’s next. What solace it’s brought me then, to start and end my days with Eternal Sunshine, an album that offers a path to heal alongside you, with enough space to fill in your own story along the way. It listens on, invites questions, not answers. That is until the final track.

As the album closes, we get the answer to Grande’s first question. Well, we get an answer. Grande’s beloved Nonna states what love means to her on “ordinary things,” dictating how she believes love should feel. “It was like seeing daylight.” The answer is yet another release…a final one. It’s a light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps not a path to eternal sunshine, but sunshine again. Sunshine to be found elsewhere, because of the love you had before, not despite it.

Nearly eight years ago, Ariana told us, “we gonna be alright.” Years later, she’s made good on that promise, still offering new and varied ways of looking at love and life, growing alongside us every step of the way. It’s what the best pop music is ultimately supposed to do, and we are better for it.

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