The full music video is expected to drop June 7
Ariana Grande debuted an unsettling teaser Monday for “The Boy is Mine,” the eighth track on her latest album Eternal Sunshine.
In the 10-second clip posted to Instagram, a man turns on a faucet and plunges his face in the sink, as a grisly hand with opaque claws pries open the door. The full music video, expected to be released on June 7, comes after music videos for “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)” and hit track “Yes, And?” came out earlier this year. All three tracks are off her seventh album, which released March 8. The “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)” video, which came out on the album-release day, draws references to the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as Grande’s character begins a procedure that erases all memories of her ex. However, “The Boy is Mine” teaser has darker undertones.
“The Boy is Mine,” which fed online rumors around her relationship with Ethan Slater (former lead in the Broadway musical Spongebob Squarepants), has an R&B-pop sound and shares the same name with the 1998 Brandy and Monica track. In a March interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, Grande said she “always wanted to reimagine” the 1998 track that topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 13 weeks.
In a Rolling Stone review, Grande’s Eternal Sunshine album was described as “a gorgeously exposed journey to the end of her world — or at least what she believes to be the end. It’s a divorce album that goes through all the stages of grief, and the singer navigates a new beginning with some of the most honest and inventive songs of her career so far.”
On the horizon, Grande will star in the novel-turned-musical-turned-film adaptation of Wicked as Glinda, Good Witch of the East, alongside Cynthia Erivo as the Wicked Witch of the West, set to release Nov. 27.