Olivia Rodrigo has come unraveled. On “The Cure,” the thematic climax of her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love, she feels “so alone” that she “might as well be on the moon.” On past albums, she might have assumed that her knight in shining armor would stave off her inescapable self-doubt, but not even love can rectify the ailment of being too smart and self-aware for your own good. And, unfortunately for Rodrigo and her audience of overthinkers, she’s learning that shit is chronic.
Rodrigo’s bread and butter has always been in transmuting the mundane yet enormous feelings that accompany young womanhood into cinematic pop bangers—fitting for the 23-year-old representative of a generation raised on screens and the belief that romanticizing one’s misfortunes is the key to finding meaning in them. But You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love sees her taking this skillset to a new level, imbuing its vivacious 13 tracks with a level of emotional and sonic complexity that 2021’s Sour and 2023’s Guts only hinted at.
If the title of “The Cure” didn’t make it evident enough, this is an album that wears its musical inspirations proudly. The foray from her pop-punk palette into ’80s new wave on “Maggots for Brains” and “u + me = ᐸ3” and synth-tinged baroque pop on “My Way,” “Expectations,” and—with a vocal assist from Robert Smith—“What’s Wrong with Me” are a welcome expansion of her established soundscape. In collaboration with longtime producer Daniel Nigro and songwriter Amy Allen, these infectious songs avoid settling for pastiche, channeling a spirit that feels definitively part of the Olivia Rodrigo Experience: a bit kooky, a bit euphoric, yet still palpably, movingly showcasing a young woman in the process of growing into the adult she’s meant to be.
You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is split into two halves, with the first six tracks tracing a lovestruck-to-the-point-of-derangement Rodrigo as she navigates a romance that isn’t built to last. Her boyfriend is looking like “an angel on the walls of Versailles” on the ebullient “Drop Dead,” and she’s so infatuated that she feels “totally insane” on the propulsive “Stupid Song.” The melancholic “Purple” sees her love becoming so overwhelming that it subsumes her, plunges the album into its crestfallen second half, where the relationship has ended yet the loneliness and resentment linger, best animated by the moody closer “Cigarette Smoke.”
Still, when Gen Z’s favorite riot grrrl gets quiet on the piano ballads “Honeybee” and “Less,” some of her tendencies toward melodrama become more conspicuous, saved from becoming overly maudlin only by virtue of her delicate, just-wry-enough vocals. “Honeybee” is as sweet—and subtly stinging—a love song as its title suggests, as Rodrigo undercuts the sentimental notion of “a face, I swear, that I could spend my whole life knowing” with a pleading, “Here’s to hoping.” Though it’s a tad too glib to fully come to life, the torchy “Less” resounds with the type of trickling devastation that comes when a relationship dissolves rather than detonates—a desperate getaway to Big Sur “only confirmed this isn’t what it should feel like.”
Rodrigo hasn’t quite mastered the incisive wringing of new truths out of novel stimuli, and she dips into a few tired lyrical tropes, like regarding the passage of time while looking at her boyfriend’s baby pictures on “Purple,” or wishing for domestic tranquility by simply watching “movies on TV” with her beloved on “Begged.” But one could chalk this up to a forgivable lack of life experience, as her flashes of wit (“They say modern love’s a cruel endeavor/And to that I say, fuck it whatever” on “u + me = ᐸ3”) suggest a lasting career as one of pop music’s brightest singer-songwriters. Rodrigo may have come undone, but You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love proves that when she uses music to stitch herself back together, the results can be nothing short of spectacular.
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