It’s only May, and 2024 has already been Ariana Grande’s year!
On March 8, 2024, Grande released her highly anticipated seventh studio album, Eternal Sunshine. Grande’s 13-track album comes after not releasing an album since Positions back in 2020. Despite the almost four year hiatus, the album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart and stayed at number one for two weeks.
Eternal Sunshine spent its first 6 weeks on the Billboard 200’s Top 10. Eternal Sunshine earns Grande her sixth number one album, and at the time of the album’s release, Eternal Sunshine had the biggest sales week for any album in 2024. (This record has since been broken by other recent album releases).
Eternal Sunshine was released after Grande had a whirlwind of a year in the tabloids. In July 2023, it was announced that Grande would be getting a divorce from her husband of two years, Dalton Gomez. Shortly after the news of the star’s divorce, news outlets reported that Grande was seeing her Wicked co-star, Ethan Slater. Grande and Slater’s relationship quickly caused extreme controversy due to the fact that Slater allegedly left his wife for the singer.
Grande ultimately created Eternal Sunshine as a response to the backlash and as a way to share her story about her divorce from Gomez. Grande began the Eternal Sunshine era back in January when she released the album’s lead single, “Yes, And?” The comeback single debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 – and this is not the only Eternal Sunshine single to reach number one.
Grande released the second single “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait For Your Love),” back in March with the album’s release. The song also debuted at number one, and stayed on the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart for its first 6 weeks. With her two number one hits, Grande ties with Post Malone and Kendrick Lamar as the artists with the most songs to hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 this year (two). This also makes Grande the only female artist to have a song hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart twice this year.
When Eternal Sunshine was released, the album broke many Spotify records. On the first day of its release, Eternal Sunshine debuted with 58.1 million streams. With this debut, Eternal Sunshine had the biggest first-day streams of an album in 2024 and became Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day in 2024. (These records have since been broken by other recent 2024 album releases. Eternal Sunshine now ranks as the fourth highest for a female artist.)
Eternal Sunshine earned over 342 million total streams during its debut week, making it the third biggest album debut week of 2024. At the time of the album’s release, Eternal Sunshine was ranked among the top 10 biggest weekly streaming debuts for a female album in Spotify history. Since its release, Eternal Sunshine has earned over 1.8 billion streams. Additionally, “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait For Your Love)” is currently the most streamed female song of the year, with “Yes, And?” being the second.
2024 has been a big year for Grande in other areas besides music, as well. Earlier in May, Grande made an appearance at the 2024 Met Gala – and she was even the surprise performer at the gala! Coming up in November, part one of Wicked will be released in theaters, where Grande plays one of the leading roles, Galinda. The first Wicked trailer was released last week, and we’re already counting down to the film’s release!
Earlier this month, Grande began to tease the next single from Eternal Sunshine, “The Boy Is Mine.” Grande confirmed the song would be the album’s third single by teasing behind the scenes photos from the song’s upcoming music video. Now we patiently wait for the music video to be released!
We can’t wait to see what other exciting things 2024 will have in store for Grande and what other surprises Grande has planned for the Eternal Sunshine era!