LOS ANGELES — The building on the quiet Los Angeles block with a plate on the door that reads “Believe” — here are the offices of Scooter Braun, Svengali to Justin Bieber. Upstairs in the back is a room filled with old arcade games and the full gamut of Bieber accolades, including a piece of paper taped to the wall identifying him as Gossip Bang Chinese Fans’ Choice Male Hottie 2013, whatever that might be.
A couple of weeks ago, Ariana Grande — signature high ponytail, her late grandfather’s slouchy jacket, go-go boots with gem-encrusted soles — was sitting in this room, just a bit agitated but playing it cool. On the table was an array of water bottles hand-lettered to spell out “My Everything,” the name of her second album, which will be released on Monday.
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Ariana GrandeCredit…
Kevin Scanlon for The New York Times
The CGI-heavy, sci-fi-theme video for her new single, “Break Free,” was about to be released, and she hadn’t had the chance to approve it, or even see the finished version. Mr. Braun, her music manager, was doing his best to reassure her, popping in with updates, to which Ms. Grande batted her eyelashes in a manner that suggested she could handle this, yes, but she’d rather not have to again.
Ms. Grande may be prim, but she is not soft. Since the release of “The Way,” her debut single last year, Ms. Grande, 21, has been on a quiet campaign to rewrite the expectations of young female pop star presentation, generally avoiding hypersexuality. She’s also challenged the idea that in order to move forward from a child star past — she was a Nickelodeon fixture for years — one must make an aggressive turn toward thematic maturity. In the middle of the peak Miley Cyrus era, this felt like a revelation. “I wanted it to be ‘Oh, wow, listen to this,’ not, ‘Oh, wow, look at this,’ ” Ms. Grande said.
“Yours Truly,” her 2013 debut album, was an unlikely collision of flamboyant 1990s pop-R&B with 1950s Puritanism — novel and at the time, unfashionable. “I wanted to be a little ’50s pinup girl,” she said. “A good girl, goody two shoes, Audrey Hepburn, classic, safe, feminine, soft, girlie.” She asserted her maturity by not making the aesthetic choices that would likely be expected of a singer of her age and provenance — high-energy dance-pop, or hip-hop carpetbagging — but kept her music largely clean.
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Ariana Grande performing in June in Miami Beach. Her new album is scheduled for release on Monday.Credit…
Jeff Daly/Associated Press
“We had the liberty to take that risk because of who she was,” Mr. Braun said, acknowledging her built-in fan base.
A sterling singer with impressive range, Ms. Grande was a genuine presence — and for those who hadn’t seen her on the kids’ show “Victorious,” an out-of-nowhere one — and had cultivated a mien just shy of coquettish. It often felt as if a wink were forthcoming, but never arrived.
“My Everything” walks an even finer line. Ms. Grande is sassier than before, and more overt in places, too, but much of her music is still painted over with a sheen of approachability and safety. The new album is also less specific in its reference points. Ms. Grande aspires to be a full-service pop star, she just has a different idea about the path there.
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Ms. Grande with Jennette McCurdy in the show “Sam & Cat” on Nickelodeon.Credit…
Lisa Rose/Nickelodeon
The lead single is “Problem,” a brassy push and pull between sweet and sultry helped out by the rappers Iggy Azalea and Big Sean; it peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Break Free” is a successful dance-pop collaboration with the producer Zedd that maintains club bona fides without anonymizing the singer. Same goes for “One Last Time.”
“Break Your Heart Right Back,” which features Childish Gambino, is a familiar slice of hip-hop soul about getting cheated on not with another woman, but with a man (a song Ms. Grande says was inspired by an actual situation). And a pair of ballads, “A Little Bit of Your Heart” and “My Everything,” make room for Ms. Grande to exercise her vocals uncontested by aggressive production.
But even though she is expanding her palette, perhaps the clearest way to underscore the difference between the two albums is by comparing the main duet on each. On “Yours Truly,” the duet was with Nathan Sykes, of the British pseudo boy band the Wanted (and also a onetime paramour of Ms. Grande’s) on the elegiac “Almost Is Never Enough,” a tragic ballad about a love that was never destined to work.
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A scene from the music video for her new single, “Break Free.”Credit…
Republic Records
This time, the duet is with the Weeknd, dark lord of erotic shock and dysfunction, on “Love Me Harder.” Over moody, thumping production, Ms. Grande sings, “If you just let me invade your space/I’ll take the pleasure, take it with the pain,” and the Weeknd retorts, “If in the moment you bite your lip/When I get you moaning you’ll know it’s real/Can you feel the pressure between your hips?”
So much for prim, then. One of Ms. Grande’s go-to strategies is to use collaborators to say what she can’t quite, and it’s effective trickery. She gets the reflected frisson, while still largely maintaining innocence. “Because of the way she was raised, she’s still a lady,” Mr. Braun said. “A lady says, ‘I know what’s going on, but I don’t need to say it right in front of you.’ ”
She’s also been choosing guests who push her not just in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of cool. The Weeknd, ASAP Ferg, Childish Gambino: it’s a somewhat left field aggregation for someone so squarely at the center of pop. Ms. Grande had simpler ambitions as a musical theater-obsessed kid from Boca Raton, Fla., who would sit in front of the TV and mimic Judy Garland, and still rhapsodizes equally intensely about Alan Menken’s “Hercules” score and India.Arie’s “Brown Skin” (“It’s so sexy but I, like, can’t sing it, ’cause I’m a white girl.”)
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Ms. Grande at the 2014 Teen Choice Awards.
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Kevin Winter/Getty Images
She came to Broadway as a teenager, and began seriously writing songs at around the same time using a Boss RC 50 looping machine, trying to emulate her hero, Imogen Heap. Though she longed to make music full time, she was pushed toward acting after moving to California, and before long landed the role of the sidekick Cat on the Nickelodeon show “Victorious,” a role that would become a launching pad and a cage. For a sensitive kid, fame of that sort had an advantage: “I really loved being able to spend some of the most important years of my personal growth hiding behind a character,” she said.
But as a musician, it was frustrating. For years Disney peers like Ms. Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers released albums that effectively doubled as advertisements for their TV characters, a fate Ms. Grande was hoping to avoid. One early song she recorded in 2011, right when she was signed, was going down that sugary path. “It was almost like if the character I was playing put out an album, that would be the lead single of her album,” she recalled.
So she recalibrated, seeking out collaborators who would respect her voice and opinion, eventually finding the writer and producer Harmony Samuels, who helped mold the first album. (Mr. Braun came on board not long after.) As a result, “Yours Truly” effectively escaped the child-star curse.
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Ms. Grande performing last year with Jimmy Fallon on “Late Night.”Credit…
Lloyd Bishop/NBC
But Ms. Grande was still a child star. Her goofy “Victorious” character was given a spinoff show, “Sam & Cat,” which had its premiere just as Ms. Grande’s first single was gaining traction last summer.
Conveniently, the show was canceled after just one season, amid rumors of tension between her and her co-star Jennette McCurdy, though Ms. Grande stiffens just a bit at the suggestion. “I wanted to continue doing the show,” she said, though continuing to play Cat was draining in terms of time and creativity. The show’s cancellation allowed for a definitive break from her past, and the freedom to pursue music full time. “That was the universe kicking everything into place,” she conceded.
Finally Cat-free, Ms. Grande is free to grow up wholly on her own terms. And she’s largely unconcerned about losing her old fans, who are growing up themselves. “The stuff they say to me online is quite shocking,” she said with mock horror. “They’ve got the filthiest mouths I’ve ever heard. But so do I. I don’t advertise that online, though. But I favorite it, I be re-Vine-ing their Vines.”
She added, “Maybe one day I’ll get away with something naughty.”
Eventually, she was told the “Break Free” video was ready for her to check out, even though at this late hour, there was most likely nothing that can be done to it. Mr. Braun by her side, she clicked on the link on her phone. On the screen, Ms. Grande appeared as an intergalactic sex kitten/freedom fighter, shooting aliens and disrobing in zero gravity. About halfway through the clip, after defeating some walking-sea-creature types, she squared off against a huge metal beast. Her breasts morphed into a pair of rockets, which shot out and destroyed it. Watching this, Ms. Grande giggled, but not because she’s embarrassed.
