you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love

It's an exciting moment to watch when an artist begins taking bigger musical risks two or three albums in; when their voice has often come into its own and they can begin fussing at its edges, reshaping what has emerged into different forms.Unfortunately, that is not the case on Olivia Rodrigo's third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. Instead, the young artist and her crew deliver a reliably effective product, but one that often opts for the safer and more proven musical directions this time around.Rather than pushing harder into what worked about her previous pop-punk successes, Rodrigo and mainstay collaborator Dan Nigro tone things down with a shoegaze-y dream pop reroute. Her staple anthemic, bratty, desperate foghorn has been stripped back for a sound that reads distinctly cooler while taking a hit in emotional immediacy.For an artist and creative team who have been shadowed by accusations of cultural cannibalism since her debut SOUR, which saw additional songwriters credited on multiple tracks, alongside criticism of sonic and aesthetic hijacking from much smaller artist Pom Pom Squad, this new project sounds more indebted to her pop contemporaries than ever."stupid song" finds Rodrigo in her finest Taylor Swift drag, while track like "honeybee" and "less" recall Billie Eilish, especially her latest release, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT. The FINNEAS-style production is present here, and the soft, dreamy, tragic vocal fluttering is near carbon copy. "less" specifically sounds exactly how I'd imagine Eilish performing a sad original Christmas song set at an airport during the dark night of the soul in a new Muppets Christmas movie produced by Netflix.Still, it's that sort of earnest, sometimes-embarrassing, heart-on-her-sleeve quality that has given Rodrigo her most important cultural contributions so far, including two of the most affective power ballads of the last decade in "vampire" and "drivers license." Now, "the cure" lives up to the legacy of those crucial anthems — it's the best song on the new record and an emotional bloodletting in the vein of those previous singles. The emotional engine is a simple, desperate guitar strum that sounds like it could have been pulled from the heaviest moments of Ani DiFranco's Little Plastic Castle. It's '90s confessionality at its tastiest: a dense, dark chocolate cake you eat 'til you're sick; a kind of pain you knowingly return to because it feels good even though it hurts.Through imagery and romantic despair, Rodrigo subtly marries "the cure" to "vampire," the bloodbath hymn that led her sophomore album, GUTS: "I got toxins in my bloodstream / You tried hard to suck 'em out." The verse ends with the confessional dread of, "But it don't matter how your love feels anymore / It'll never be the cure." It's Rodrigo at her most tonally distinct and creatively important. "the cure" lives on that shelf for the artist and her collaborators, as does her debut single, "drivers license."Another album highlight is "purple," a cheery smokescreen that embodies the dreamier direction the album takes at its most effective and colourful — and while tonally bright, the rot underneath arrives clearly in its lyrics. Rodrigo's fixation on the colour reads as a clever reference to the branding motif across her first two records, and an allusion to her creative spirit. By the final verse, everything melts together until it turns black, concluding with the simple tragedy of love curdling into sadness.A Robert Smith feature on "what's wrong with me" is a cool addition, even if it turns out to be one of the less successful and more performative curative moments on the record. And I guess there's a strange novelty to pulling in the Cure's frontman for a record that, not for nothing, has its own song called "the cure." Then there's "cigarette smoke": an uncool wailing that balances authenticity with real heart, the kind of unguarded reach the album pulls off at its best. While you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love suffers from some risk aversion, it's understandable in an unforgiving pop landscape where stars are no longer permitted the half-life they once were. Rodrigo's debut was nothing short of a phenomenon; its follow-up was a creative triumph. Sensing where things were headed, this third LP may have been influenced by a need to re-establish her as hot, current and pivotal to the cultural conversation.you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love has real strengths, and the bones of a brilliant artist and a savvy creative team are very much intact. If it sometimes feels overly managed and anxious to belong to the moment, the best of it proves Rodrigo can still reach the heights of her first two records when she swings for them.