What to do after writing some of this century’s most devastating songs about the torment of breaking up? Write some of this century’s most devastating songs about the ecstasy of getting 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 gifted of the many chroniclers of Gen Z romance to emerge in Taylor Swift’s wake. She could convey the hot sting of betrayal, as in her smash debut single, “Drivers License”; she could channel the injustice of watching an ex somehow carry on, as in “Good 4 U”; she could deliver a sick burn like somebody handing out Halloween candy, as in “Get Him Back!” (Because it deserves remembering: “He had an ego and a temper and a wandering eye / He said he’s six-foot-two, and I’m like, ‘Dude, nice try.’”)
Yet on her thrilling third LP, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” Rodrigo, 23, turns to the pleasure that comes before the pain — and, in a feat very few in pop music are ever able to pull off, ends up with a number of first-flush-of-love songs as potent as any breakup tune.
She opens the album with “Drop Dead,” in which she compares a guy 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. In “Stupid Song” she cycles through a series of metaphors to describe her lovesickness — she’s a car without a brake, she’s a heart made of melting wax — before finding a simpler but infinitely more vivid way of getting her point across: “You should feel how I feel when somebody says your name.” (Chills.)
“Maggots for Brains” is a song about how useless she becomes “when my baby goes away,” and let’s just 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 album’s next tune, “U + Me = <3,” is its high point: a euphoric promise of devotion that sounds like Sixpence None the Richer reborn as a Midwestern emo band. It’s got two young lovers carving their names into car seat leather, and it’s got a girl trying to impress her boyfriend’s older sister with her cynical humor and her taste in yacht rock.
More importantly, it’s got these lines of pure poetry: “They say modern love’s a cruel endeavor / And to that I say, F— it, whatever.” Kurt Cobain would be proud.
Working with her longtime producer, Dan Nigro, Rodrigo has expanded her stylistic palette to accommodate these new emotions; “You Seem Pretty Sad” pulls in chiming folk-rock and synthed-up new wave and even has a gorgeous wine-bar piano ballad, “Less,” that might put the scare in Rodrigo’s pal Laufey.
The album is structured to trace the arc of a relationship, which means that the second half dips into the heartbreak we’re used to getting from Rodrigo. But she’s writing 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).
In “The Cure,” which rides a strummed acoustic-guitar pattern that strongly recalls Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm,” she realizes a boyfriend can’t fix what’s broken inside her; “Begged” examines the limits of one partner’s willingness to look past the failings of the other. After hearing these songs, the happier ones at the beginning of the album reveal bits of shadow that Rodrigo has built into them to presage what’s to come — to presage what always comes.
It’s fitting, then, that Robert Smith of the Cure — perhaps pop’s most jubilant gloommeister — hovers over this LP like a patron saint: nodded to in “The Cure,” of course, but also “Drop Dead,” where Rodrigo name-checks the Cure’s classic “Just Like Heaven.” Smith himself turns up in “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 sounds like they’d have it any other way.
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