In the opening verse of “Drop Dead,” the heart-fluttering synth-pop single that kicks off Olivia Rodrigo’s third album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” the singer-songwriter swoons over a guy who “knows all the words to ‘Just Like Heaven’” — a 1987 classic by the Cure that, to the 23-year-old Rodrigo, qualifies as a golden oldie.
Rodrigo further telegraphed her new-wave and alt-rock admiration when she released the album’s highly effective second single, a wrenching, acoustic-guitar-driven excretion of self-loathing that sounds like a cross between the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm” and the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong” called — yes — “The Cure.” She insisted the title wasn’t another reference to the goth-rock legends, but that became harder to believe once she revealed, onstage during a surprise set last weekend at a Barcelona music festival, that the new album also featured a track called “What’s Wrong With Me,” a duet with the Cure frontman Robert Smith himself.
Such carefully unfurled, resolutely on-message devotion to her somewhat novel influences captures both what is refreshing about Rodrigo and what, five years into her superstardom, has hardened into something of a hindrance.
In a world otherwise populated by cheery, cheeky pop stars with perpetual grins and predictable taste, Rodrigo’s moody, unorthodox and sometimes even countercultural reference points are a breath of fresh air. When she recently took some (questionable) heat for her sartorial allegiance to baby-doll dresses, for example, she dutifully cited the anti-patriarchal riot grrrl movement of the early ’90s and confrontational grunge frontwomen like Courtney Love and Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland as her inspirations, proving herself once again as an A+ student of Gen-X signifiers. (She even invited the Breeders to open for her on several dates of her Guts World Tour.)
Still, such self-imposed comparisons to her messier forebears draw attention to a relative sheen that continues to halo Rodrigo, a former child actress who got her start starring in an “American Girl” movie and two high-profile Disney series. Even when playing distorted electric guitar chords in a punk-rock frock, there remains about her a telegenic poise.
Just the same, Rodrigo’s excellent first two albums — the spirited 2021 debut “Sour” and the more mature but still effervescent 2023 follow-up “Guts,” two of the sharpest and most consistent pop LPs of the decade so far — injected some smart, spiky energy into the Gen-Z musical mainstream. While “You Seem Pretty Sad” has moments that match the heights of her most inspired work, on the whole it is the first album she has released that feels less than revelatory.
Rodrigo first launched into the stratosphere with “Driver’s License,” a shattering, piano-driven confessional written with and produced by the Long Island emo veteran Dan Nigro, with whom she has continued to work ever since. Seamlessly melding universal feelings with the specifics of Rodrigo’s own life, “Driver’s License” possessed the power to lift teenage experience up to an exalted state and to make anyone older than that remember, quite viscerally, what it was like to be young and heartbroken.
That early success, though, might explain why Rodrigo’s subsequent albums have become increasingly bogged down by inert piano ballads — a minor flaw of “Guts” that becomes more noticeable on this solemn third album, which chronicles a romantic relationship in its entirety, from the tingle of infatuation through the slow accumulation of doubt and an eventual breakup.
The strict adherence to that chronology sometimes stilts the album’s momentum. “Drop Dead” is an exuberant opener, but there is an immediate drop-off in energy during the next two tracks, the anxiously impassioned “Stupid Song” — which begins with forlorn piano chords and takes too long to build toward a more thrilling, Lorde-like second half — and the dreamy, atmospheric love song “Honeybee,” one of two tracks on which Rodrigo is the sole writer, which she delivers with a delicate fragility. (The songwriter Amy Allen, best known for her work with Rodrigo’s ex-rival Sabrina Carpenter, has a co-writing credit on five of the 13 tracks.) “It’s too hard to describe this in a way that feels honest,” Rodrigo sings, echoing the sentiment of the previous song, on which she had just gushed, “I want you more than any stupid song could ever say.”
Rodrigo is a strong and rangy vocalist, but she has a penchant for notes that teeter perilously on the upper edge of her vocal register. Her singing is usually most affecting when she plumbs the depths of her chest voice, as she does on the wrenching chorus of “The Cure” — “I’ve got toxins in my bloodstream,” she admits to a well-meaning lover, “you tried hard to suck them out” — and the dreamy but devastating closing track “Cigarette Smoke,” which finds her expelling pent-up aggression. “You will never know my sorrow,” she sings, as if on the verge of tears. “Why’d I try at all?”
The album usually fares best when Rodrigo leans directly into that previously professed new-wave influence — even if the Smith duet is more effective as a co-sign than a stand-alone song. Built around a riff that would have sounded right at home on an ’80s college rock station, “Maggots for Brains” is a bouncy tune about the depressive emotional rot that happens when her boyfriend is out of town. That lush sound continues into an even stronger following song, “U + Me = <3,” a highlight that effectively nods to retro dream-pop and its more recent revivalists, like Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy. Less compelling is the up-tempo but joyless “My Way,” led by a grating synth riff, which finds Rodrigo forcefully telling off a girl who’s getting a little too close to her man, with the bitter vehemence of Paramore’s “Misery Business” or Taylor Swift’s “Better Than Revenge.”
It might sound unfair to say I wish Rodrigo sounded like she were having more fun on an album titled “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” but she has amply proved in the past that a song can be born of difficult realizations and still feel like an adrenaline-rushing blast. The new material could use some of her old vitality. It’s refreshing when the mood finally lightens on the penultimate track, “Expectations,” a driving, twinkling synth-pop number in the style of Chappell Roan that finds a post-breakup Rodrigo skewering some of her new suitors (“Don’t think my future husband’s at this bar in Silver Lake”) and swearing — with a self-deprecating wink — that her next romance will be different.
“In a couple months, a man will be procured,” she sings. “He will be evolved, and I will be adored.” And if not? At least she’ll know exactly which records to put on to help get over him.
Olivia Rodrigo “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love” (Geffen)
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