Olivia Rodrigo’s breakthrough may have been loud, but the song that catapulted her to it was not. “Driver’s Licence” was the slow-building, piano-led ballad that channelled the raw grief of your first heartbreak into a moment of catharsis. It turned Rodrigo into the first breakthrough of the decade, with a rapidity even her equally famous peers – Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan – had not experienced. But through such whirlwind fame, Rodrigo has been the one in control – picking her own collaborators, writing her own songs and doing everything at her own pace. She values craft above all, choosing her record label (Interscope/Geffen) because they recognised her songwriting talents, and demonstrating an acute awareness of how society might baulk when she embraces her own contradictions.
She’s maintained control by letting those contradictions shine through in her music. Above all, it’s Rodrigo’s understanding of human messiness – our rage, jealousy, heartache, pettiness, hysteria – that makes early songs such as “Good 4 U”, “Deja Vu” or “Bad Idea Right?” so obscenely relatable. Over the years, the songwriting itself has evolved, grown more nuanced, but that core message has not. Long before she headlined Glastonbury festival last year, it was clear she was a generational talent – one fluent in heartbreak and what leads us there.
Split into two sides, the first half of her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad For a Girl So in Love certainly dives right into the dizzying intensity of new romance. Following the punkish energy of 2023’s Guts, everything here is lavishly produced, like walking around a palatial room of lacquered floors, beautiful furniture and velvet drapes. Opener “Drop Dead” finds Rodrigo careening into a new love, entranced by the guy she passes in the bathroom “looking like an angel on the wall of Versailles” (because no one does hyperbole like a woman in her early twenties).
Even on that first song, though, you wonder if Rodrigo’s hopes will hold out in reality: “Pisces and a Gemini/ But I think we might go really nice together,” she sings dreamily, the universe screaming at her to run. She scatters warning signs through these songs in a way that feels preemptive, like she should have seen them all along: “All of my girlfriends roll their eyes/ And tell me to take it slow this time,” she sings on “U + Me = <3”, while determinedly carving her and her beau’s names into a leather car seat. I love the humour in it: “I like your big… sister,” she croons over jangling guitars, so sweetly that you doubt whether she meant to wrongfoot you at all. And in one of many perfect couplets on this album, she acknowledges she’s throwing caution to the wind: “They say modern love’s a cruel endeavour/ And to that I say, ‘F*** it, whatever’.”
Love can be its own kind of sickness. Robert Smith, Rodrigo’s hero and friend, knew this in the Eighties and she knows it now, wallowing in the moody basslines of “Maggots for Brains”. She feels wrong while her love is away, as rotten as the fruit she’s left in her fridge: “I’m a zombie in my body/ I’m a train off of the track.” So besotted, in fact, that she fantasises about tragedy just so “he’d come over and take real good care of me”. Possessiveness becomes its own kind of monster on “My Way” – one of the few nods to her earlier work – in a brilliant slice of snark at her boyfriend’s ex. It’s childish and she knows it, revelling in the childish but borderline frantic chants of: “Maybe I’m a petty bitch but you make me resort to this/ That’s it, I win. That’s it, I win!”
Aided by longtime co-songwriter and producer Dan Nigro, Rodrigo senses just when to pare it back for maximum emotional heft. “Purple” is the moment everything starts to disintegrate, a stomach-churning slalom through woozy, funereal synths, jittery programmed drums that transition suddenly into live, and frail piano notes. She’s so intertwined she can’t see clearly: “I had big dreams ‘til I tied myself to you/ Now I’m all-consumed.” The purple she sings of is a bruise, turning black: “Melt with you ‘til it just feels sad.”
As Rodrigo starts to emerge from that bleary haze in the second half, her emotional intelligence comes to the fore as she starts to unpack what was wrong. She’s astounding on “Begged”, a torchsong for the ages, in which her words land with an assuredness we didn’t hear on the first half of the record. Like Lily Allen’s “Beg For Me”, she knows that pleading for affirmation will make it feel empty when it comes: “So I’m cool and forgiving, I’ll take what you’re giving/ But nothing’s quite enough, when I know that to get it, I begged.”
Her Robert Smith duet, “What’s Wrong With Me”, is gorgeous – a lovely and all-too rare moment of two generations finding common ground. Rodrigo takes the baton for The Cure’s romantic longing: “My head is spinning and my stomach is sick/ Say I’m in love, so it’s hard to admit/ I can’t eat, I can’t sleep/ I think you’re what’s wrong with me.” Amid the waspish buzz of “Expectations”, she remembers that first encounter with her ex in a different light: “I met him at a party/ I think he was on drugs/ He wasn’t smart or funny/ I convinced myself he was.” It’s deliciously sardonic, sending its narrator up as much as the men falling short.
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“Cigarette Smoke” is the final word, the last thread from which she has to untangle herself. “Some nights can be/ So f***ing lonely,” she admits over stark strums of acoustic guitar, “But it’s better than begging for you to stand up for me, honeybee.” She draws out that last word as you would poison from a wound. The song builds, as she wonders if the way the relationship ended will negate all the good moments: “It’s bone-dry, bitter and hollow/ You will never know my sorry/ Why’d I try at all?” she asks. But she knows why. It’s better to know she gave it her all, even if the other person didn’t. She gave this album her all, too, and it paid off in the most extraordinary way.
