Ariana Grande’s lead single Hate That I Made You Love Me drops on 29 May 2026, the first preview of her eighth studio album Petal, due 31 July on Republic Records, as reported by Billboard.
Grande has been slowly building anticipation for Petal since announcing the album on 28 April 2026, and the past week has added two more moments to that build-up: a snippet of the song’s instrumental shared to her Instagram on 18 May, followed by a tease of the opening lyrics posted on 19 May through the @brighterdays Instagram profile.
If the strategy is to make fans feel every single day between now and the end of July, it is working.
What we know about Ariana Grande’s Petal lead single
Hate That I Made You Love Me is produced by Grande alongside Iranian-Swedish producer Ilya Salmanzadeh and Max Martin, the trio that has been behind much of her best-known work.
Grande described the song in a post as “one of my favorite songs that I’ll ever write,” which is a significant thing to say for someone who has already written Thank U, Next, No Tears Left to Cry and the entirety of Eternal Sunshine.
The single arrives nearly two years after Eternal Sunshine dropped in March 2024 and just over a year since the public drama surrounding Grande and her co-stars from the Wicked film dominated every entertainment conversation imaginable. If Hate That I Made You Love Me delivers on the weight of that build-up, it will be the biggest music moment of mid-2026.
Everything we know about Ariana Grande’s eighth album Petal
Grande announced Petal with a departure from her signature look. The cover artwork is a black-and-white close-up photograph of her smiling, hair partially covering her face, no high ponytail in sight. It was a visual statement before a single note had been heard.
The album is twelve tracks in total, executive produced and co-written by Grande and Ilya. In a description shared alongside the announcement, she said Petal is “something that is full of life and growing through the cracks of something cold and hard and challenging.”
The album’s imagery and language consistently references growth, persistence, and something delicate surviving difficult conditions.
Petal will be released under Grande’s own imprint BabyDoll Music, under exclusive licence to Republic Records.
The 29 May single is the first taste of the record in any audible form, making it one of the most anticipated drops of 2026.
When Hate That I Made You Love Me arrives on 29 May, it will be the first real indication of what direction Grande has taken with Petal. The full album follows on 31 July 2026, giving fans roughly two months of build-up before they get the complete picture of what she has been working on.
