Among the wildfires, floods and devastating war in the Middle East, Ariana Grande’s body has somehow been one of the topics of the year. As she’s embarked on her tour, which followed a busy two years promoting and coincided with the release of her eighth album, , the discourse has been inescapable.

In 2023, when Grande already appeared to have lost weight in , she publicly said that she was “the healthiest I’ve ever been” and encouraged people to stop commenting on her body. Three years later, she looks thinner than ever. The central question occupying many column inches and causing much handwringing among pop fans has been: should we be talking about this, or not?

And so, naturally, the conversation has raged on and on and on, images circulating, theories emerging, fans fighting and moral high grounds being occupied left, right and centre, the internet awash with both legitimate concern and sickening scorn.

But you don’t need to look at Grande’s body, let alone comment on it, to get a sense of how she is feeling. It is easy to forget among all the Instagram reels that we are talking about an artist who expresses herself through an audio medium, not a visual one. It was her appearance in the video for “Petal”, the title track for her new album, that most recently caused a stir – but it’s all there in the lyrics of the album, too.

Many of the songs seem to address a collective, a culture, an insatiable media whose adoration flips to disdain in half a second. On “Warning Signs”, an ominously named interlude track ostensibly about a fickle lover who ghosts and love-bombs, we find perhaps the most poignant and heartbreaking lyrics of all. “My pain is music to you, hear me everywhere”, she sings. “My voice plays in a taxi passing by / You don’t deserve me”. And then, finally: “I wish someone could hear me”.

I am a longtime fan of Grande. She is funny, likeable, gracious and, in my view, the best pop vocalist alive today (and one of the best, of any kind, of all time). Her breathy runs, soprano belt and otherworldly whistle tone make the hairs on my arms stand on end. I have always wanted to see her live.

Yet I approached the concert last night at the O2 in London, the seventh in a string of 10 sold-out shows that close out this tour, with some trepidation. I, too, have followed the endless debates about Grande’s mental and physical health, her undeniably small frame, the discussions about whether outpourings of concern on social media help or hinder, the question of whether she should “set an example” for her young fans. I have been shocked by the abuse she is subjected to on “snark” Reddit forums and then hypocritically gossiped with friends and colleagues about her break-up with her co-star Ethan Slater.

And so mixed with excitement, I found guilt. I felt ambivalent about seeing her under conditions that appear to have pushed her to “take a step back from visibility” once the tour ends (she said at her show early this month that the decision was not “reactive or impulsive” but “thoughtful and empowered”; it’s still worth noting that it involves her cancelling a scheduled appearance in the West End show Sunday in the Park with George next summer).

But for the two hours she was onstage, I and the other 20,000 people at the O2 had no choice but to do what we all seem to have forgotten to do for the past few months, maybe years: hear her. From the joyful disco grooves of the opening song “Yes, And” to the powerhouse delivery of “Dangerous Woman” much later in the show, Grande’s musicianship was staggering. Yes, she tottered on laughably high heels to elevate her tiny stature, and yes, she swung her iconic shiny ponytail, but more than anything she simply sang, showing off the talent that, underneath it all, is the reason she’s here.

The fans erupted with screams for the newer numbers from but the whole arena went feral for the consumerist hit “7 Rings” and jumped for joy to the euphoric belter “Break Free”, for which the stage lit up in an LGBTQ+ rainbow. For “Eternal Sunshine”, she asked for 90 seconds of quiet as she set up layers upon layers of live vocal loops – a protracted moment of silence for the voice, and the voice alone.

Where Grande’s songs once focused on bedroom antics (who could forget the image of “walking side to side” after a night with a lover?), her past two albums have been categorisable as therapy-pop, turning snippets from earlier tracks into a whole lyrical ethos. “Me and my truth / We sit in silence”, she sings on “We Can’t Be Friends” – another moment of euphoria in the O2 – and on “Oh Well” she sings sagely about how “good things can replace dysfunction”; how “I’ll meet my own needs”.

But for all the talk of redemption, there is plenty of darkness here too. Grande’s songs, along with the show – whose set is a haunted house – connote an ambivalence of her own, at once light and dark, reflective and raw. “Long as she gets the ovation each night / Heartbreak won’t bite here in paradise,” she sings on “Petal”: lyrics that felt positively dystopian as she sang them to thousands of phones clamped high in desperate hands and as superfans at the barrier reached towards her, hysterical.

There was nothing but love for her in the room; twice the whole crowd chanted “Ari, Ari”, and there were cries in quiet moments of “I love you” (“I love you more,” she responded, in her best Glinda sparkle). Yet it was difficult not to feel the weight of it all, and to see more clearly than ever how even our screams and cheers are just more coins being shoved into the celebrity slot machine in the hope of a return. “Monday I got you all over me… Friday you’re suddenly ghosting me,” goes “Warning Signs”.

Grande has been in the spotlight since she was a child and has since been through every facet of the celebrity machine (from Nickelodeon to young pop star to sex symbol to Hollywood). She has also faced unimaginable trauma in the death of her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller and the deadly terrorist attack on her concert in Manchester in 2017. Grande tells us in her songs that she’s not a victim. But she also tells us that it’s too much. That she can’t win. That she didn’t ask for all this. And now she’s showing us, too, by taking herself out of view. “It’s bye, this time for real,” she sings on “Petal”. “Tired of painting endless pictures of a life that isn’t mine.”

Halfway through the show, she stopped to thank us, to say she’s “the luckiest artist in the world”. I felt for her. That is simply not true. I don’t feel that much of what she has achieved is down to luck alone, and I also don’t think that the outcome of her achievements, if you look beyond the glamour, seems very lucky at all. But I certainly felt lucky to have finally heard her sing her heart out.

It’s deeply sad that her vital need to become temporarily invisible will also render Grande less audible. But last night I felt buoyed by the fact that the voice of this once-in-a-generation talent remains at full power, not even slightly dampened by the cloud that hangs over her. It’s the one thing nobody can take away.