Ariana Grande Is Bored and That’s Your Problem Now

By the time Thank U, Next arrived—Ariana Grande’s fifth album in six years—it had become genuinely difficult to look away from her. Not because of the chart positions or the streaming records, but because she seemed to be operating at a frequency that most artists only hit once, if at all. Every track on that record sounds like she already knows how this ends and has decided to enjoy the ride anyway.

Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored closes the album, and the title is the entire argument. Not I love you. Not I want you. She’s bored, and apparently that’s sufficient motivation. The song is framed as a directive—and from a male listener’s position it lands as a very particular kind of proposition: dump whoever you’re with, immediately, because Ariana Grande has nothing better to do tonight and you’re the solution she’s settled on. You know it won’t fix anything. You go anyway.

The video makes the premise stranger and better. Charles Melton—Reggie Mantle from Riverdale, carrying an unfair quantity of good-looking—plays the object of attention alongside model Ariel Yasmin, while Grande orbits them both with the specific energy of someone who has already decided how the evening ends. She sings: I put a spell on your face, and now I want to know how you taste. The delivery is casual in a way that the content absolutely isn’t.

She also sings: You could get it in the morning, just like it’s yours. And I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t work. It does. That’s the thing about Ariana Grande at this point in her run—the craftsmanship is so good that even the blatantly horny stuff sounds inevitable, like the song couldn’t have been written any other way. Thank U, Next is the kind of album that makes you feel slightly embarrassed about what you were listening to before it.