Ariana Grande’s ‘Sweetener’ has debuted at number one on the Billboard chart.
The 25-year-old singer hit the top spot on the US chart, knocking Travis Scott’s ‘Astroworld’ off the top spot and sending Nicki Minaj’s ‘Queen’ to third place.
After the record hit number one, Ariana tweeted a link to a news article about her achievement and wrote: “hellooOo i am so grateful.”
This is Ariana’s third album to reach number one, following ‘Yours Truly’ in 2013 and 2014’s ‘My Everything’.
‘Sweetener sold 231,000 copies in total, including 127,000 traditional sales, to reach number one.
The record was also the second-highest sales for a female artist in 2018, behind Cardi B’s ‘Invasion of Privacy’.
Drake’s ‘Scorpion’ and Post Malone’s ‘Beerbongs & Bentleys’ complete the US top five.
Meanwhile, Ariana previously revealed Pharrell Williams “forced” her to write about the Manchester terror attack for the record, as a tribute to the victims.
The singer was left devastated last May when a suicide bomber unleashed an explosion shortly after her concert at the Manchester Arena – killing 23 people, including children, and injuring 139 – but, although her anxiety was through the roof afterwards, the ‘Happy’ hitmaker encouraged her to pen ‘Get Well Soon’ for those who were affected.
She said: “Overall, [Pharrell] kind of forced it out of me because I was in a really bad place mentally. I’ve always had anxiety, I’ve had anxiety for years. But when I got home from tour it reached a very different, intense peak.
“[Pharrell] was like, ‘You have to write about it. You need to make this into music and get this sh*t out, and I promise it will heal you.’ And it definitely helped.”
‘Sweetener’ also features a love song she penned for her fiance Pete Davidson, whom she got engaged to in June after a few weeks of dating, and she has admitted she wrote the track just a week after they started getting to know one another.
She said recently: “‘Pete Davidson’ is obviously inspired by my fiancé, I wrote this song like a week after we started hanging out. Sometimes when you feel a certain way about something and you can’t express it with words as well as you can with music, then I sent it to him. I want this song to live forever as music lives forever.”
And the LP contains a collaboration with her “big sister” Nicki Minaj.
She explained: “So ‘The Light is Coming’ features Nicki Minaj who is my big sister and one of my best friends that I’ve met through this industry. I love the message behind it, it’s about people who can be so close minded or to blind-sided by their own opinion to find the truth.”
