In most casting rooms, being told "you're not authentic enough" just means you don't get the callback. In Ariana Grande's new video, that line ends in a massacre.
Shot for "Petal," the title track off her new album, the music video runs seven minutes and opens with a content warning before cutting to black-and-white footage — Grande plays Pepper, a bright-eyed newcomer actress who, after a string of failed auditions, gets told to her face by a producer lurking off-camera that she's "inauthentic." What follows has been described as a performance worthy of standing alongside The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The video was directed by Christian Breslauer, and this isn't his first time turning a Grande music video into a horror short — in the earlier "Hate That I Made You Love Me," he had Justin Long dig his own grave.
Petal was co-written and co-produced by Grande and Ilya, marking their first collaboration since 2014's "Problem." In the album's press release, Grande describes it as something that "blooms out of the cold, hard, and challenging cracks" of life.
Grande is currently in the middle of her first tour in nearly seven years, a massive run that spans her pandemic-era Positions, the Wicked-era Eternal Sunshine, and now possibly tracks from Petal as well. The tour is set to wrap with a run of London shows. Once it's over, her next order of business, according to reports, will be going after the hackers who keep leaking her music and private photos.
