A couple of months ago, Ariana Grande explained her new strategic philosophy to Billboard: “My dream has always been to be — obviously not a rapper, but, like, to put out music in the way that a rapper does.” Which is to say not on a traditional tightly-controlled pop star rollout, but in the drip-drip-drip fashion of the streaming era, in which artists bombard listeners with music in rapid succession, barely leaving room to reflect. And yet the period leading up to the release of “Thank U, Next,” Grande’s fifth album, which was released on Friday, hasn’t been quite that radical. There were singles, and videos, and now an album — nothing to fear here. The latest single is “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored,” a satisfying thumper with an astral-trap beat and Grande deciding that, in fact, she’d like to be the other kind of rapper as well. Not to say that she’s purely rapping on this song, but rather that rapping as an act has melted so thoroughly that the chasm between what it currently is and what Grande is doing here isn’t very vast. So much so that when she belts out a few lines near the song’s end it sounds like someone else altogether has arrived.

(Grande spends the whole video stalking a couple made up of a handsome young man and a Grande doppelgänger. She keeps urging them to split, up until she inserts herself between them, and then she chooses … herself.) JON CARAMANICA