ERNAL SUNSHINE TOUR ✶ KIA FORUM, LA ✶ Shot on available light ✶ Live review ✶ ERNAL SUNSHINE TOUR ✶ EteRNAL SUNSHINE TOUR ✶ KIA FORUM, LA ✶ Shot on available light ✶ Live review ✶
ZAYFR
THE WRITING
WHAT’S COMING
ABOUT
SUBSCRIBE
ARIANA GRANDE ARRIVES AT THE FORUM ON HER OWN TERMS
Six years away, and the most understated major tour in pop. The case that the woman, finally, is the work, not the persona.
By Sergio Ramírez
· Photos by ZAYFR / Color No.3 · June 21, 2026 · 6 min
↗
ROLL 01 / 24
Ariana Grande, Eternal Sunshine Tour, Kia Forum, Los Angeles. Shot for ZAYFR / Color No.3.
The most useful thing to understand about The Eternal Sunshine Tour is that it is not, by the standards of the current pop arena, a major tour. Forty-three shows, mostly two-night stands, in the same handful of North American cities Ariana Grande has always played. No stadiums. No costume documentary streaming the next morning. No Coachella headline grafted onto the rollout. In a period in which her closest peers have run some of the most maximalist live circuits in pop history, Ariana came back understated. And that restraint, more than anything, is the argument of the show.
It has been seven years since she last toured. Sweetener arrived in 2018, was clouded by tragedy and exhaustion in Ariana's personal life, and was followed by the seven years that followed: a marriage, a divorce, the Wicked press cycle, the body discourse. For most of her audience, those events constituted the entirety of her artistic output. Eternal Sunshine, the album, was released into that vacuum in 2024. It was received politely. Critics called it slight. The Eternal Sunshine Tour is the case for why they were wrong, and more than that, the case for why the era around the album, the Wicked era, the years of being looked at, is, in retrospect, the work.
The conceit is borrowed openly from Michel Gondry: a fragmentation, a memory-erasure clinic. The interludes have Ariana wading through burned-out houses and holding a younger self by the hand. The question is Charlie Kaufman's, and it is also the question every famous woman who has survived public scrutiny is eventually forced to answer: do you erase the painful memory, or do you integrate it. The show stages her choosing integration. It does this, repeatedly, by refusing the moves an arena pop tour in 2026 is supposed to make.
The show stages her choosing integration. It does this by refusing the moves an arena pop tour in 2026 is supposed to make.
THE ETERNAL SUNSHINE TOUR, KIA FORUM
The clearest refusal is structural. About twenty minutes in, alone on a darkened stage, Ariana sets up a loop pedal and asks the room to be silent. She layers her own harmonies live, one pass at a time, until the underbed of "Eternal Sunshine" exists in the air. The room of seventeen thousand goes silent because she asks. The gesture's lineage is FKA twigs and Reggie Watts, not Beyoncé. In a pop landscape currently competing on choreography density and pyro budgets, asking an arena to hold still while you build a vocal stack from scratch is a statement of values. It says: the voice is the instrument, the rest is decoration.
The loop-pedal moment. Seventeen thousand people, silent because she asked.
Earlier in the set, the dance-pop run hits like a release valve. "One Last Time" into "Rain on Me" into "Break Free," three songs whose meaning in queer rooms over the last decade has, at points, exceeded their meaning anywhere else. Ariana knows. There is a generation of gay men whose adolescence was scored by exactly these three songs and the show stages that fact without comment, which is the most generous way to stage it.
The same logic governs "Hampstead." Staged with no dancers and almost no light, the song is Ariana's autofictional ledger of being misunderstood in print and online, and what she does with it onstage is decline to dramatize it. She closes her eyes. She does not act it out. Instead of expanding the wound into spectacle, she contracts it into stillness. The fans who came to hear "Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I'm Bored" expected a different night. This one is Ariana asking her audience to meet her where she is, not where she has been.
IF THE FORUM WAS HER CHOOSING INTEGRATION OVER ERASURE, PETAL IS WHERE WE FIND OUT WHAT SHE BUILT FROM THE PIECES.
SERGIO RAMÍREZ · ZAYFR
Then "Dangerous Woman," which provides the most straightforwardly impressive piece of vocal performance in current arena pop. Ariana metered the verses the way a sprinter walks to the line: conserving, holding back, pacing the build. The bridge was a held breath. The final chorus is where she spent everything she had been conserving, and the belt arrived clean and unforced, sustained past the point where a less trained voice would have broken, while monitors and glass cracked in syncopation on the screen behind her. It is worth being plain about this: very few working pop stars can do, live, what Ariana Grande did with her voice on "Dangerous Woman" at the Forum, and almost none can do it while choreographing. Beyoncé and Gaga are unmatched performers, but Ariana belongs to a specific and increasingly rare class: the last generation of pop stars who came up before the algorithm swallowed the industry whole, when an album cycle meant performing live on television multiple nights a week, when the voice was the non-negotiable. That training shows. The gap between her live vocal capacity and that of her younger peers, the Olivia Rodrigos and Billie Eilishes of the moment, is not close.
The final invitation is the one most likely to be argued about. During "Into You," a piece of backstage footage plays of her taking off her makeup, changing, unguarded. It is the same move Lady Gaga ran on the Mayhem Ball, with one difference: Gaga's footage is live, captured nightly, fed to the screens in real time. Ariana's is pre-recorded. The discourse on this distinction is already underway. It is also beside the point. Gaga is staging the act of unguardedness. Ariana is staging the fact of it. The video plays whether or not anyone watches it that night. The gesture is the argument. That a pop star at this altitude is showing the seam at all, that the woman who spent a decade managing her angles is now using arena screens to display herself without them, is the thing worth tracking.
The show closes with "Supernatural," a slow lift into the rafters that recreates the Brighter Days Ahead album art, performed with a composure that conceals what must be considerable fear of heights. Then she is gone, the credits roll, and what is left is the recognition that the night has been, structurally, an inversion of the comeback tour as a genre. The comeback tour is supposed to be a reassertion of dominance. Eternal Sunshine is, instead, a careful and deliberate downsizing of the apparatus around a voice that needed less of it than the apparatus has been telling us.
The setlist is missing Sweetener, most of Thank U, Next, and the yuh-yuh of the character she played in public for the better part of a decade. The omissions are the point. What Ariana brought to the Forum is the artist she became while no one was watching her tour. What she is offering now that we are watching again is the work, not the persona. The Eternal Sunshine Tour is an arrival of the artist and woman Ariana is now.
Petal is next. It will be the first album of what the Eternal Sunshine Tour has made clear is a new period entirely, one that can be separated cleanly from everything that came before it. The tour made the case that Ariana has changed, that the persona has been shed and what remains is the artist underneath it. The album will tell us what that artist has to say. If the Forum was her choosing integration over erasure, Petal is where we find out what she built from the pieces.
SERGIO RAMÍREZ
Founder and editor of ZAYFR, a music and culture publication in Los Angeles. He writes, shoots, and art-directs all of it.
Get it in your inbox
One email a week: the new piece, the show picks, the photos. ZAYFR is just getting started. Be here early.
ZAYFR ✶ EST. 2026 ✶ LOS ANGELES ✶ ZAYFR ✶ EST. 2026 ✶ LOS ANGELES ✶ ZAYFR ✶ EST. 2026 ✶ LOS ANGELES ✶ ZAYFR ✶ EST. 2026 ✶ LOS ANGELES ✶ ZAYFR ✶ EST. 2026 ✶ LOS ANGELES ✶ ZAYFR ✶ EST. 2026 ✶ LOS ANGELES ✶
ZAYFR
Music as memory. A publication by one fan who cares too much.
© 2026 ZAYFR — all frames first three songs, no flash.
built on available light ✶