As promised, Ariana Grande dropped a live album from her “Sweetener World Tour” just hours after the final date wrapped in Los Angeles. Titled “k bye for now (swt live),” the singer has been updating fans on the album’s progress over social media for several weeks.
The 32-track album spans songs from all across her career, including hits like “7 Rings,” “God Is a Woman,” “Dangerous Woman” and “Love Me Harder” — and features guest spots from Nicki Minaj and Big Sean.
After dropping two albums in six months, “Sweetener” in August of 2018 and the surprise release, “Thank U, Next,” last February, the singer launched the tour in March and spent much of the rest of this year on it, traversing North America and Europe. At times the tour was challenging and she shared her feelings over the summer after fan videos emerged of the singer crying during a concert.
“I feel everything very intensely and have committed to doing this tour during a time in my life when I’m still processing a lot,” she wrote, “so sometimes I do cry!” she wrote.
Variety wrote of the tour’s first Los Angeles date in June, “You’ve come to the right place if you want a pop show that’s giddy, splendorous, beautifully designed, expertly performed and almost a little bit avant-garde in its staging. If you’re willing to swap all the personal asides you might expect out of a typical pop-diva show for something that’s more of an experimental visual art piece that happens to include terrifically fun songs and performances, it’s not such a bad tradeoff. At the very least, if you were at Staples Center Monday for the first of her three L.A.-area appearances, you walked away knowing you’d just witnessed something that, design-wise, you’d never exactly seen before.”