At times, the defining mood of the 2020s seems to be disassociation. The culture of these years will be remembered for lots of things that dulled and distracted the senses: easygoing country music, friendly AI chatbots, ketamine nasal sprays, conspiracy theories that were preferable to the truth, and droning podcasts about all of the above. Feeling is out; vibing is in.
But the case against this line of thinking is simple: Olivia Rodrigo.
In early 2021, the then–Disney star’s single “Drivers License” pierced the pandemic-weary zeitgeist like a geyser in a desert. The song’s soppy piano and screamed choruses served to interrupt the flow of any playlist by triggering the listener’s sympathy and, perhaps, alarm (Is she okay? Am I okay?). Her albums Sour (2021) and Guts (2023) flaunted clever wit and theater-kid poise with adventuresome work from the rock producer Dan Nigro—but the real asset was her ferocity. As she hopped between punk crunchiness and bedroom-pop intimacy, every trembling lyric was backed by palpable, well, guts.
Her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, makes that earlier work sound like kids’ stuff. That’s not to dismiss what she did before—she was bottling a particularly teenage form of spite, hot and thin like boiling water. Now that she’s all of 23 years old, the emotional brew is thicker and even messier. The album narrates what she has called her first “adult” relationship, and it was initially meant to be entirely made up of love songs. Then she and her guy broke up, and the work got darker. The result is a wild listening experience—so intense it verges on sickening.
She’s in unstable territory from the first moments of the lead track, “Drop Dead.” A synth riff evokes the wistfulness of a John Hughes movie, but it’s rhythmically shifty, like she’s about to bolt. Rodrigo sings about a first date in a slithering, secretive tone of voice—then starts stabbing one note over and over for the chorus. The effect is unnervingly happy. One imagines the narrator of the Proclaimers’ most maniacal hit undertaking their 500-mile journey with a double dose of Vyvanse.
Quite soon, Rodrigo is fully crashing out. “I feel right, I feel wrong, I feel totally insane,” she sings on the stunning “Stupid Song,” which sets the honeymoon phase to pulsing piano and galloping drums. The track apes the softly anthemic approach of U2, Coldplay, and the National—until all of that elegant uplift topples like an overly ambitious wedding cake. Next, the ballad “Honeybee” sounds midnight-stark until a choir appears like sudden floodlights, beautiful and harsh. A duo of jangle-pop delicacies, “Maggots for Brains” and “U + Me = <3,” wave red flags as if they’re pom-poms. “And sometimes, at a low point / I even wish for a tragedy,” Rodrigo sings, “‘Cause I know he’d come over / And take real good care of me.”
The starkly self-incriminating nature of those lyrics marks a nice evolution in the contemporary canon of heartbreak pop. Rodrigo came up under the influence of Taylor Swift, who taught a generation of singers how to write post-breakup disses lightly dashed with antiheroic confessions. But now Rodrigo is pulling at a thread underlying the modern crisis of young romance: the way that dating has become bound up with goal-seeking and social performance. The album opens with her stalking the perfect guy on her phone; midway through the track list, she has the relationship she dreamed of yet is still unable to feel secure. The villain isn’t only her man—it’s also “all the pretty girls in the foreground of my mind,” as she sings in “The Cure.”
[Read: Two paths for the pop star]
As she explores these tensions, Rodrigo portrays herself as straining against the confines of her art form: She wants her man “more than any stupid song could ever say,” and she warns that “it’s too hard to describe this / In a way that feels honest.” But really, she’s quite adept at getting her point across, combining vivid anecdotes (a cry on the curb at LAX), fascinating inflections (full-abandon yodels, facetious sultriness), and highbrow crudity (“They say modern love’s a cruel endeavor / And to that I say, ‘Fuck it, whatever!’”). This queen of lyrical literalism is even starting to experiment with metaphor, though she hits low points with the bland medical imagery of “The Cure” and figurative misfires of “Begged” (“I’m an anchor in the ocean / You know I could never leave”—but what if the captain were to crank the winch?).
In any case, as Rodrigo surely knows, music is precisely the medium with which to convey unspeakable feelings. Leaving pop-punk behind, she and Nigro mine a stately, orchestrated sonic lineage running from 1980s new wave through ’90s alt-rock to 2000s indie—musical traditions that have served to dress up grubby neuroses (obsession, self-hatred) in cinematic splendor. The album is laden with references to the Cure, including a great cameo from Robert Smith. Rodrigo clearly understands that his band’s essence lay not only in its dreamy guitars but also in the total abjection beneath them.
Still, as Rodrigo’s songwriting matures, the heavy referentiality of Nigro’s production is starting to seem silly. The nostalgia bait on her previous albums was refreshing—she was a Disney teen, yes, but she had the taste of a High Fidelity clerk. Zoomers and Boomers unite! By now that sort of novelty has worn off. When I listen to the future karaoke classic “Expectations,” I want to admire the songcraft—the loop-de-looping hooks, the satisfying call-and-responses. But my brain is pulled toward figuring out whether the song sounds most like Cyndi Lauper, Gary Numan, or the B-52s.
The imitative nature of the production is, really, how Rodrigo is most in line with the pop norms she otherwise defies. Burrowing into the past with our phones, streaming the familiar at the expense of the new, is one method people use to numb themselves to the present. Rodrigo, brain on and heart open, makes art about the terrifying thrill that comes with giving the here and now everything you’ve got. Were she to write her own musical language, she’d cut an even deeper mark.
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