Ariana Grande – hate that i made you love me

Three days after the song dropped and went straight to number one on iTunes in 48 countries, Ariana Grande released a five-minute music video shot by Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning cinematographer — a darkly comedic horror story in which she haunts the man who buried her, played by Justin Long, until he loses his mind.

Ariana Grande had been quiet for most of 2025. There was the press tour for Wicked: For Good, the second half of the Universal two-part adaptation of the musical; her Grammy win in February 2026 alongside Cynthia Erivo for the duet recording of Defying Gravity; the deluxe edition of Eternal Sunshine that pulled the 2024 album back to number one on the Billboard 200 more than a year after its initial release. New original music, though, had stopped. There had been hints across the spring that something was coming. There had not been a date.

The first signal arrived in mid-May 2026 in the form of stenciled lyrics appearing spray-painted on the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. The next signal was a teaser of a music video in which the actor Justin Long, driving alone at night, glances into his rearview mirror to see Grande staring back at him as a trap-influenced production builds underneath. By the time the song itself arrived at midnight on May 29 — a 3:17 mid-tempo pop track produced by Grande, the Swedish hit-maker Ilya Salmanzadeh, and Max Martin, the same writing trio behind Eternal Sunshine — Grande had already announced its place in the larger picture. Hate That I Made You Love Me was the lead single from her eighth studio album, Petal, due July 31, 2026 from Republic Records. It would also be the first release on Grande’s own newly-launched imprint label, BabyDoll Music. She called it, on Instagram, “one of my favorite songs I’ll ever write.”

The numbers arrived almost immediately. Hate That I Made You Love Me debuted with 8.7 million streams on Spotify on its first day, making it Grande’s second-biggest debut on the platform after her 2024 single Yes, And?. It hit number one on iTunes in 48 countries. It topped Apple Music. It pulled in 2.8 million streams in the United States in 24 hours. Stereogum described it, accurately enough, as “the closest thing to a rock song Grande has released in quite a while, or ever” — the production has a leaner, more guitar-forward quality than the dance-pop and R&B textures that have defined most of her studio work. The lyric is structurally about the strange dignity of being someone other people fell in love with against their own better judgement. “I hate that I made you love me,” the chorus says. “Sorry if I made me your type.”

Christian Breslauer, Janusz Kamiński, and Justin Long in an underground bunker

Three days later, on Monday June 1, 2026, the music video arrived — five minutes of cinematic horror-comedy that has very little to do with the standard pop-singer-in-a-warehouse format. Christian Breslauer, who had directed Grande’s 2025 short film Brighter Days Ahead, returned to the project; the cinematographer he and Grande recruited for this one was Janusz Kamiński, the two-time Academy Award winner best known as Steven Spielberg’s regular collaborator on Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and most of Spielberg’s subsequent work. The actor Justin Long, whose recent career has included the horror films Jeepers Creepers and last year’s Zach Cregger-directed Weapons, co-stars as the man on the wrong end of the song’s lyric.

The video opens with Long burying Grande’s character in an underground bunker filled with stacks of black-and-white composition notebooks marked with her “insecurities” — an apparent nod to the song’s pre-chorus line “Know that I will find my way from you / Like flowers from a tomb.” She does not stay buried. Grande’s character starts appearing in the backseat of Long’s car, then in front of it, causing him to swerve off the road and into a fiery crash he somehow walks away from. She continues to haunt him: at home, where his attempt to burn old mementos in the fireplace ends with him accidentally setting himself on fire in a slapstick sequence; later, at a roadside diner where the waitress on his name tag reads Petal and the entire kitchen staff slowly turns into Grande. The video’s visual reference points have been variously identified as the 1986 film The Hitcher and the Twilight Zone episode “The Hitch-Hiker.” The font used in the title cards directly echoes the Hitcher film posters.

What makes the rollout interesting beyond the headline numbers is what it signals about Grande’s larger plans. She begins her Eternal Sunshine Tour on June 6, 2026, in Oakland — her first headlining run since the Sweetener World Tour in 2019 — and has publicly said the tour may be her last for a long, long time as she pivots towards acting. She returns to film this fall in Focker-in-Law opposite Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller. She is scheduled to make her stage musical debut in 2027 with a production of Sunday in the Park With George. Petal, in other words, may be the last new Grande album for several years — and a five-minute Kamiński-shot, Breslauer-directed cinematic horror clip is precisely the kind of statement an artist makes when they want a single song to land hard before they step away. Watch the video.