Olivia Rodrigo knows love isn’t just a feeling: It’s an illness. The spinning head and butterfly-filled stomach of a crush could be mistaken for an oncoming flu; a breakup can feel like the kind of wasting disease that used to send women to the sanitorium to convalesce on the beach, wrapped in wool blankets. Over the course of her new album, Rodrigo uses her talent for cataloging the various indignities of romance to draw up a list of physical symptoms, from upset stomach to low appetite to total mental dissociation. The album is called you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, but you could substitute “sick” for “sad” and it would still make sense.
If this sounds like an unpleasant vibe for an album, do not worry—even when exploring the gnarliest feelings with the laparoscopic camera of her songwriting, Rodrigo maintains her commitment to expressing them endearingly. And with her third album, the first to break with her tradition of all-caps single-word titles, she shifts her theatrical pop tendencies from the snottiness of ’90s alt rock to the romanticism of the ’80s: think less Veruca Salt and more the Bangles, less Hole and more… Devo? Rodrigo has never sounded more adventurous—some fans might miss the bratty sarcasm of a “good 4 u” or a “get him back!”, but Rodrigo is now a twentysomething eager to take a few big steps out of her comfort zone. On the last track of 2023’s GUTS, she asked, “When am I gonna stop being great for my age and just start being good?” That time is now.
you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is split into two parts: the first a breathless play-by-play of an intense romance; the second an account of its demise. The A-side is 25 minutes of pure swooning. The chamber-pop confection “drop dead” suspends Rodrigo in an ecstatic tableau at the moment she says she’s the “most alive I’ve ever been”—she sees her lover as “an angel on the walls of Versailles” when he’s merely waiting in line for the bathroom, and claims she finally gets what the song “Just Like Heaven” is all about. (Not the last hat tip to the Cure on this album.) “stupid song” is even more delirious, opening with the somber piano she often favors for her slower numbers before breaking into a giddy sprint. The relationship has barely begun, and the wheels are already threatening to fall off. Rodrigo, smitten to the point of insanity, wails on the chorus that she’s “a heart made of wax/And I’m melting in the sun,” an image of slow annihilation that doesn’t signify the good time you’d hope to have in the throes of a crush.
Even before the the first section ends, the couple’s crashout seems inevitable: She’s carving their names into the leather car seat on “u + me = <3” (at last, the four little words we’ve been longing to hear: Olivia Rodrigo jangle pop), cackling in the face of a defeated rival who can’t take a hint on the new wave rager “my way,” and so lonely when her boy is out of town on “maggots for brains” that she fantasizes about the misfortune that might bring him home again: “Sometimes at a low point, I even wish for tragedy/’Cause I know he’d come over and take real good care of me.” The latter track, a jaunty hybrid of “Friday I’m in Love” and “Dancing With Myself,” ends with a retro call-and-response, Rodrigo really relishing the dooo in “What can I do but think of you?”, sounding both sweet and a teensy bit desperate.
It’s fascinating to watch an artist known for songs about heartbreak process the experience of being in love—even in the moments of purest ardor, there’s still an awareness of how it all might go wrong. In a recent interview, she mentioned one of the songs on the album reminded her of “something people would play at their weddings, hopefully.” That would likely be “honey bee,” a love song with an undercurrent of uncertainty running beneath its expression of total devotion. “I hope I never see what your face looks like going/A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing,” she sings, “Here’s to hoping.” Maybe it’s the slightly eerie-sounding choir on the outro that omits the “I love you” present in the previous choruses, but her acknowledgement of the potential end of a relationship feels a little ominous.
The hinge point is “purple,” a song that captures the exact moment when romantic obsession becomes so all-encompassing that you can no longer discern your own desires from your partner’s. On “honey bee,” Rodrigo marveled at how “everything I own just feels like ours”; now, so ensconced in her boyfriend’s life that she’s got a favorite florist in his hometown, she can’t tell where her perspective ends and his begins: “I melt with you/You’re red and I’m blue/Now I see the world in purple.” It’s an astonishing track, a co-production with Jim-E Stack (late of Lorde’s Virgin), with Rodrigo’s vocals running smoothly over a chorus of mini-Olivias echoing and weaving around her, while the percussion toes the line between the racing heart of a good crush and the racing heart of a panic attack. A queasy coda cuts the thrill short, with Rodrigo whispering: “Melt with you till it all turns black/Melt with you till I just feel sad.”
A moment for co-songwriter and producer Dan Nigro at this juncture. you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is their third collaboration, and by far their most sophisticated. The friendship with pop-punk has pretty much ended—the palette is, broadly, “1980s,” but it encompasses new romantic-era rock, post-punk, college rock, and just a touch of mall pop, somehow running the gamut from Gary Numan to R.E.M. without sounding like pastiche at any point. (“my way,” with its snarky chanting, themes of rivalry and jealousy, and a backing track that stops on the word “stop,” feels like a quick peek at the old Olivia.) One of Nigro’s strong suits is his taste for production that’s at least half a click of the dial away from what’s expected, and there are plenty of special surprises in the arrangements: programmed drums that transition sleekly into live ones on “purple,” a jumpscare synth on “expectations,” a touch of sentimental piano to close out “maggots for brains.” In turn, Rodrigo has adjusted her approach to vocals, bringing subtlety and restraint to the verses that make the belted chorus moments all the more heartrending.
The B-side tracks the relationship’s downturn. She names a song about realizing that love doesn’t fix everything “the cure,” and then Robert Smith himself, whom Rodrigo invited onstage for a couple of duets at her Glastonbury headlining set last year, pops up to feature on “what’s wrong with me.” Over murky synths, the two singers complain about how terrible they feel post-breakup, and when they sing “I can’t eat/I can’t sleep” together, Rodrigo and Smith’s accents diverge charmingly, can’t and cahn’t.
“what’s wrong with me” lands between a pair of stripped-down tracks, the acoustic ballad “begged” and the piano torch song “Less.” Both of these have a radiant clarity in their theses that Rodrigo has tapped into since “drivers license”—even in the depths of despair, she can zero in on exactly what’s bothering her, whether it’s how begging for affection invalidates its eventual arrival, or how getting dumped in a mature, classy way doesn’t make it hurt any less. The final track, “cigarette smoke,” is her “Fake Plastic Trees” moment, acoustic strumming providing a steady backdrop for Rodrigo’s survey of the split’s aftermath: a quiet house, five beers in the fridge, only one car in the driveway. Does the end of a relationship nullify everything that happened before it? “Tell me something honest so the memories turn dark,” she sings, building to a howling crescendo, then letting her voice flicker out at the end like a spent candle.
Emotional transmission has always been a big tenet of the Olivia Rodrigo experience—she needs us to feel everything as intensely as she does, and will use every musical trick in the book to make it happen. By the end of you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, she’s dragged us through the wringer and back again. Thank God, then, for the penultimate song “expectations,” a dance track that gathers all of the tension and agony of the prior songs and blows it up with some glittery dynamite. Alongside a synth line that could have been written by Mark Mothersbaugh and a goofy bridge of stern male voices plucked right from “Material Girl,” Rodrigo puts on a minidress and a brave face and commits to upping her standards: “I’m not kissing any boy that is passive/Their indecision is painfully unattractive.” Even if her positivity reads as the attitude overcorrection of a newly single person—“Now I am secure/I am so evolved” she sings dryly on the pre-chorus—the song is simply so fun that you can’t help but go along with it. This is what Rodrigo does best: lures you in, overrides your doubts, then sends you on your way, grateful for the opportunity to get totally emotionally consumed. She keeps finding herself at the mercy of forces greater than her will—jealousy, insecurity, lust, anger—but when it comes to making music about it, she’s always in control.
