Ariana Grande threw it again to the ’90s while giving like to icons Monica and Brandy on her new album, Eternal Sunshine.

Grande, 30, unleashed her highly anticipated album on Friday, March 8. As she hinted in interviews main up to its arrival, Eternal Sunshine is full of allusions to her break up from ex-husband Dalton Gomez and the new romance she struck up with her Wicked costar Ethan Slater following their respective splits.

One seeming nod to Slater, 31, is “The Boy Is Mine,” a song that now not handiest shares its name with the song Brandy, 45, and Monica, 43, launched in 1998 but in addition interpolates the vintage R&B hit.

“I’m normally so unproblematic / So independent / Tell me why / ‘Cause the boy is mine, mine,” Grande sings within the first verse. In the chorus, she repeats how the titular boy is hers, how she “can’t wait to take a look at him,” adding, “The stars, they aligned / The boy is minе.”

Grande printed the process of constructing “The Boy Is Mine” when she spoke with Zane Lowe for Apple Music. In the interview shared on Thursday, March 7, Grande said that this song represents her checking out a new musical perspective. “It’s roughly like, ‘OK, I’ll play the bad girl, right here’s your bad-girl anthem,’” she stated, including that the monitor is a sister song to “True Story,” another music on Eternal Sunshine.

Grande went on to mention that she “always sought after to reimagine” Monica and Brandy’s “The Boy Is Mine” in “some roughly method.” The unique monitor crowned the Billboard Hot 100 for 13 weeks in 1998 and is an R&B staple.

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“I more or less used to be like, ‘This is an excessively unhealthy concept, I believe, however there is a big staff of my enthusiasts that in reality, they do love a bad-girl anthem,’” mentioned Grande. “And this is kind of an elevated version of that.”

Grande in the past stated her “The Boy Is Mine” repurposed portions of “Fantasize,” an unreleased monitor of hers that leaked in 2023, reportedly making it to the Philippines’ Spotify Daily Top Songs before it used to be pulled from the platform. The song went viral on TikTok, which caused Grande to address it. She said she initially wrote the observe “for a comedy comic strip a couple of lady group,” according to Teen Vogue, and that she was once “going to come again to this hook to make use of eventually.”

“The Boy Is Mine” is “Ariana’s version” of “Fantasize,” she explained to Zach Sang in a February 26 interview. “They’re totally other now,” she persevered. “So even if you’ve heard them — since you stole them — they’re very other now.”

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