Seven Rings and No Apologies

Whoever said money can’t solve your problems, Ariana Grande sings in 7 Rings, must not have had enough money to solve them. She delivers it with the complete sincerity of someone who has earned the right to that opinion. The Manchester bombing was 2017. Mac Miller died in 2018. The Pete Davidson engagement collapsed publicly. The volume of grief she processed in a compressed window was almost incomprehensible, and her response was to release two albums in quick succession and buy her friends expensive jewelry. That’s one way to cope.

I’ve been paying attention to Ariana Grande since before it was easy to admit—back in the Sam & Cat days, when she was a hyperactive Nickelodeon fixture alongside Jennette McCurdy, the Italian-American kid from Boca Raton who was clearly operating at a different level than the material required. The pop career made sense. The remarkable thing is how consistently it has delivered: every record takes at least one genuine formal risk while still hitting its mainstream targets, which is harder than it looks.

The track samples My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music and turns it into something aggressively luxurious—a bubblegum-rap flex about buying everything she wants and making no apologies for it. I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it. The song isn’t pretending to be deep. It’s retail therapy as aesthetic statement, and it works because she’s not embarrassed by any of it. Resilience doesn’t always look like healing. Sometimes it looks like this—sequins, diamond rings, and a chorus built for the back of a car at full volume with the windows down.