Album of the week: Olivia Rodrigo –'You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love'

According to my niece – staying for the weekend and alarmed by my constant playing of this ultra-emoshe album – I seem pretty much like a heartbroken teen/twentysomething girl. From global chart-topping smash ‘drop dead’ (“one night I was bored in bed / and stalked you on the internet”) to ‘what’s wrong with me’ (“say I’m in love, so it’s hard to admit / I can’t eat, I can’t sleep / I think you’re what’s wrong with me”) via ‘honeybee’ (“baby boy, honeybee / God, I love the way you look at me”), this album is lower-case lyricism with higher-stakes, dizzying highs and end-of-the-world lows. I’m not crying, you’re crying!

If there’s an equation that sums up the third album by this graduate of the school of High School Musical, it’s: relationship arc + Gen Z indie nostalgia + big pop songwriting = Taylor Swift for (mildly) alternative kids. Or, more concisely, it’s the fifth track, which is titled ‘u + me = <3’. This is all the feels, and then some more of the feels – quite possibly built from the wreckage of her last relationship, with British actor Louis Partridge – and brilliant for it.

Over 13 songs and 51 minutes, Rodrigo doubles down on the musical passions that made 2021 single ‘Good For U’ such a modern rock anthem – but also made it so indebted to Paramore’s ‘Misery Business’ that she had to belatedly add that band’s singer Hayley Williams and ex-guitarist Josh Farro to the writing credits.

The love of this 23-year-old Californian who grew up in the Disney dream factory for wintry British post-punk and indie is apparent not just in The Cure references (“you know all the words to 'Just Like Heaven' / and I know why he wrote them”) in ‘drop dead’ – a glorious opener and the lead single which, incidentally, has had almost a quarter-of-a-billion plays on Spotify in only two months. It’s there in the Joy Division bassline of ‘maggots for brains’.

It’s there, too, obviously, on the ‘the cure’, a near-five-minute epic that starts as strummy goth-pop and builds to a strings-drenched tornado of defiance and going-solo empowerment. And even more obviously on ‘what’s wrong with me’, a winsome duet with Robert Smith that’s giving tear-smeared make-up and dog-eared copies of NME from 1983.

Olivia Rodrigo - the cure (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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It’s not just four-decades-old Anglophilia. ‘u + me = <3’ represents Eighties and Nineties indie’s American wing, evoking the 4AD-friendly sound of Throwing Muses and Belly. A slightly earlier era is channelled in the New Wave synth-rock of ‘my way’ is a hammering yowl of frustration and wholly thrilling – unless, ofc, you’re the dufus ex- who “never get[s] the message”.

Rodrigo’s Disney-princess vocals are also given their space to shine. They’re front and centre on ‘begged’, a pretty, finger-picked, folky lament. They’re jazz standard-worthy on piano ballad ‘less’, another blast of nostalgia, this time all the way back to the Fifties.

By the time we’ve been through all the stages of this life-changing/heart-bruising relationship and get to the closing ‘cigarette smoke’, Rodrigo is leaning into the existential woe of a clothes-rending romantic poet, singing of how “it’s bone dry / bitter and hollow / you will never know my sorrow”. Over more building guitars and more swirling strings and more howling vocals, here are five minutes and 40 seconds that – after all the love-and-loss-and-loathing rollercoastering that has gone before – could be, well, a bit much.

But such is the strength of the songwriting, the conviction of Rodrigo’s delivery and the relatability of the romantic drama – even for those of us who seem pretty unlike a heartbroken teen/twentysomething girl – that you’re fully invested, fully moved and fully smitten.