What to do after writing some of this century's most devastating songs about the torment of breakup? He writes some of the most devastating songs of this century about the ecstasy of being together.
With her first two albums, 2021's Grammy-winning “Sour” and 2023's triple-platinum “Guts,” Olivia Rodrigo proved herself to be perhaps the most talented of the many chroniclers of Gen Z romance who emerged in Taylor Swift's wake. He could convey the sting of betrayal, as on his hit debut single, “Drivers License”; could channel the injustice of seeing an ex move on in some way, as in “Good 4 U”; could give you a sick burn like someone handing out Halloween candy, as in “Bring it back!” (Because it's worth remembering: “He had an ego, a temper, and a wandering eye / He said he's six-foot-two, and I said, 'Dude, nice try.'”)
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However, on his exciting third LP, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” Rodrigo, 23, draws on the pleasure that precedes pain and, in a feat that very few in pop music are capable of accomplishing, ends with a series of songs about the first moment of love as powerful as any breakup tune.
He opens the album with “Drop Dead,” in which he compares a guy waiting in line for the bathroom at a bar to an “angel on the walls of Versailles,” an early sign of how high the emotional ceiling is here. On “Stupid Song,” he runs through a series of metaphors to describe his lovesickness (it's a car with no brakes, it's a heart made of melted wax) before finding a simpler but infinitely more vivid way to get his point across: “You should feel what I feel when someone says your name.” (Shivers.)
“Maggots for Brains” is a song about how useless it becomes “when my baby is gone,” and let's take a second to savor the fact that Rodrigo is putting that title into the world less than four years after she was still a working Disney kid. The next song on the album, “U + Me =
More importantly, it has these lines of pure poetry: “They say modern love is a cruel enterprise / And to that I say, Fuck it, whatever.” Kurt Cobain would be proud.
Working with his longtime producer, Dan Nigro, Rodrigo has expanded his stylistic palette to accommodate these new emotions; “You Seem Pretty Sad” features loud folk-rock and synth new wave and even has a beautiful wine bar piano ballad, “Less,” that might scare Rodrigo's friend Laufey.
The cover of Olivia Rodrigo's new album.
(Geffen Records)
The album is structured to chart the arc of a relationship, meaning the second half dives into the heartbreak we're used to receiving from Rodrigo. But he writes about familiar scenarios with new wisdom, drawing sophisticated conclusions about why people in love do the things they do (and don't do the things they don't do).
On “The Cure,” which uses a strummed acoustic guitar pattern strongly reminiscent of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm,” she realizes that a boyfriend can’t fix what’s broken inside her; “Begged” examines the limits of one partner's willingness to look beyond the other's failings. After listening to these songs, the happier ones at the beginning of the album reveal fragments of shadow that Rodrigo has incorporated into them to foreshadow what is to come, to foreshadow what is always coming.
It's fitting, then, that The Cure's Robert Smith, perhaps pop's most gleefully gloomy, looms over this LP like a patron saint: he nodded his head on “The Cure,” of course, but also on “Drop Dead,” where Rodrigo mentions The Cure classic “Just Like Heaven.” Smith himself appears on “What's Wrong With Me” for a duet with Rodrigo in which the two learn to accept that love, in the end, might be what kills them.
“My head is spinning and my stomach is sick,” they sing, and neither of them sound like they would have done it any other way.
