Welcome to Sleeper Hit Support Group, a column diving into the song currently occupying the bottom spot of the Billboard Hot 100.

In a pop landscape that asks more questions that it answers, I'm setting out to answer three questions about each of these songs: how it got here, if the song is good, and where it's going. In this 100th spot we'll find unlikely ascents, falls from grace, and resurgences of hits from bygone eras.

Today, we're discussing "nowhere, nobody," the closer of Ariana Grande's eighth album, petal.

How did it get here?

Ariana Grande is in a confounding stage of her career. I don't think anyone really saw petal coming, and it arrived at a time and in a way that set it up for the middling reception its received.

In the time since 2024's eternal sunshine, a solid effort that saw Grande dip her toes into disco on songs like "yes, and?" and "bye," she's been subjected to what may be the most heightened public scrutiny of her career. Both topics of said public scrutiny happened to stem from Grande's jaunt playing Glinda in Jon M. Chu's unnecessarily drawn out film adaptation of the hit musical Wicked.

The back-to-back press tours for the two Wicked movies felt endless. All these interviews of an increasingly emaciated Grande next to her similarly emaciated co-star Cynthia Erivo quickly began to blur into one amorphous blob of discourse, little of which having to do with the actual movie. When people online weren't discussing Grande and Erivo's concerning appearances or their sometimes nonsensical answers to sometimes equally nonsensical questions, they were discussing Grande's relationship with castmate and Broadway SpongeBob star Ethan Slater.

To keep it brief, Slater and Grande met and connected while filming Wicked in 2023 while both parties were still married to other people (Grande to real estate mogul Dalton Gomez, Slater to his high school sweetheart Lilly Jay, who is also the mother of his only child). There is no concrete evidence of infidelity, but the timelines were at the very least quite suspect. The whole thing blew up publicly in late 2024 around the first movie's release, coming to a head when Jay published a heartbreaking personal essay in The Cut about how the necessity of privacy in her work as a clinical psychologist conflicted with the unexpected public spectacle of her divorce. "As a visitor in this digital land I thought had successfully chosen not to live in, it is uncanny to see myself in a shoddy mosaic of others’ words and impressions," she penned.

Regardless, the press tours continued on, Grande was nominated for (but lost) a handful of Oscars and Golden Globes. People presumed she planned to abandon her music career for the foreseeable future to focus on acting. Grande and Republic records both denied rumors of a tour behind eternal sunshine, and it seemed that there were no initial plans for one. At some point, Grande changed her mind, and the eternal sunshine tour was announced in August of last year, which she confirms to be "one last hurrah... for now."

In contrast to most big-budget pop star tours, this one required minimal traveling with three+ show runs in nearly every city. Grande is currently in the middle of the tour's final leg, a 10-date residency at the O2 arena in London. But even with the relatively truncated schedule, the tour required her to drop an upcoming role in the 13th season of American Horror Story (I'm sure that's the least of her worries anyway).

Grande would announce petal shortly before the tour's commencement after a few weeks of social media teasers. Its lead single "hate that i made you love me," a subdued, mid-tempo track that sounds straight out of the late 2010's bedroom pop craze, debuted at #1 on the Hot 100. Like much of the album that succeeds it, "made you love me" blurs the line between Grande's romantic relationships and her relationship with her fans. "Is it really my fault you all gave me your hearts on your own accord? / I don't really think so," she shrugs in the bridge.

In lieu of the pomp and circumstance an album from Grande would typically receive during a rollout, much of the promotion for petal was relegated to her live shows and other pop-up events she didn't have to physically be present for. Grande is overexposed as is, and the eternal sunshine tour was her first in seven years. The attention didn't need to be herded; it was already present.

The record's title track/second single was premiered at her first of three shows in Montreal, and was released properly along with the full record three days later on July 31st.

Critically, petal is Grande's worst received album since 2014's My Everything, with an average critic score of 64/100. I can't say I disagree. For the sake of keeping the public at arms length, a lack of desire and drive, or some combination therein, petal sees Grande refuse to use the attributes that made her a strong and compelling pop star in the first place.

So with all that said...

Is the song any good?

"nowhere, nobody" is fine. Solid even. There are several much, much worse songs I've covered in this column, and it may be petal's most inspired offering. But I know Grande can do better. She has made good, even great albums in the past. Some have found their way among my personal cannon of capital-G Great pop songs ("Greedy," "blazed," and "no tears left to cry" come to mind off-rip). I can't say that about any of the material on petal.

In the scant press material that exists for this album, Grande describes petal as coming from a place of "unfiltered rage." So why doesn't it sound like that? Does the real "fuck you" come from how little it sounds like she's trying? How little she uses her once-in-a-generation vocal talent on any of petal's songs?

"It's kind of about breaking up with all different kinds of negative attachments, whether it's my own monsters in my own head, external voices, things that no longer serve me," Grande said in a promotional video. "nowhere, nobody" ties that mindset up as a gift to Grande's younger self: "Deep breaths, honey / There's no more running / and there's nowhere, with nobody else that I'd rather be," she sings in an Imogen Heap-esque stack of vocal harmonies.

The muffled breakbeat that comes in during the song's final minute is a nice touch, but like the rest of petal, "nowhere, nobody" is ultimately anti-climactic and not as fully realized as it could have been if given more care and attention. I have a hard time believing Grande even wanted to make petal in the first place, and the closer being just as subdued and low-effort as the rest of the record is further proof.

Where is it going?

Despite my disappointment with the music itself, if my assumptions about Grande's lack of motivation for her music career are true, I don't necessarily blame her. For the past decade-and-a-half, everything Grande has done has been picked apart with such intense scrutiny in a way that could really only be rivaled by the media's treatment of Taylor Swift. The amount of tragedy in her life that was ultimately incurred by her music career (Manchester arena terrorist attack, people blaming her for Mac Miller's death, having to be managed by Scooter Braun for a decade) is enough to traumatize someone for a lifetime.

Earlier this month, a representative for Grande informed People that she will be "...taking a step back from visibility" after the eternal sunshine tour concludes next Tuesday. The representative elaborated by saying “She looks forward to finishing the tour and ending it on a high note, both healthily and happily, and then taking a much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances, which has led to endless, ongoing public scrutiny. This tour has been a beautiful experience for her. She loves her fans and has loved every minute of this tour so much.”

The tour itself has incited continued, and often justified concern for Grande's health, as her emaciated appearance becomes too difficult to ignore under arena spotlights. Concluding her review of Grande's opening night at the O2, reporter Kate Solomon explained her experience as follows:

"Every so often that illusion of lightness breaks. She turns on the mid-stage and leans sort of forward as she sings Past Life, a move to communicate her earnest romantic pain, a plea for empathy. The angle she’s standing at and the lighting collude to knock the breath out of me for a second: I shouldn’t be able to see this person’s skeleton.

Those moments are deeply conflicting and in them I wish she had cancelled this run of dates rather than wait for them to wrap up. The show is a good testament to her 13-year pop career and worthy of being enjoyed, but that is hard to do when you feel that someone spectacular might be slipping through our fingers right in front of us. I really hope this tour does not go down in history for the wrong reasons: I hope it ends up a four-star aside in a long and rich life."

I truly hope Grande takes this break from her career to recalibrate. The people whose interests are vested in Grande's continued ability to be a well-oiled machine have very clearly failed her. She has been plopped into project after project and commitment after commitment since the second pandemic restrictions started to lift. If she takes a year or two off to recover from both the overexposure and whatever real health issues she is clearly suffering from, she can enter her late-career as a revered cultural icon instead of yet another case study.