No Tears Left to Cry

No Tears Left to Cry arrived on April 20, 2018 as the lead single from Ariana Grande's fourth studio album, Sweetener. The track was her first release after the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017, and it carries that weight without being weighed down. Grande, working with Max Martin, Ilya Salmanzadeh, and Savan Kotecha, built a song that opens in a near-whisper before pivoting into a buoyant, UK garage-inflected chorus. The verses and chorus sit in different keys, a structural choice Grande made to keep listeners off balance.

The song's message of resilience and forward motion was widely read as a direct response to trauma, though Grande herself has let the music speak. Billboard called it a song that does not try to run from the context of the attack, and critics praised its balance of emotional gravity and pop euphoria. It debuted at number three on the Billboard Hot 100, extending Grande's record as the only artist to land every lead single from her studio albums in the top ten.

Dave Meyers directed the accompanying music video, which premiered the same day. It features Grande walking on walls and ceilings inside rotating, Escher-like sets, a visual metaphor for reorientation after upheaval. The video has accumulated hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. No Tears Left to Cry was nominated for several awards and remains a defining track in Grande's catalog, a piece of pop music that addressed a real-world event with grace and without losing its commercial edge. [edit]