You Seem Pretty Impressed For a Music Critic

I think of Sour, Olivia Rodrigo’s debut, in the same way as old Notes app poems I used to write; though not without artistic merit, the tracks often work better as late-teen journalling than they do soundly structured songs. She levelled up with 2023’s Guts, whose enthralling (if inconsistent) portrait of angsty youth shot her even further into the mainstream, playing to sold-out arenas and headlining Glastonbury. At its best, her writing operates on both diaristically intimate and broadly universal levels; the tension she explores on ‘All-American Bitch’, for instance, works as a music industry critique, but it also—stripped of context—sounds like an early-twenties girl just going through it.

In any case, Rodrigo’s third album, the convolutedly titled You Look Pretty Sad For a Girl So in Love, is far and away her best yet. Where past albums were held back by uneven pacing, filler tracks and occasionally clunky writing, Rodrigo here presents only A-grade material. Played in order, the album charts a relationship from giddy beginning to bitter end, soundtracked by thrilling rock songs and careful, tender balladry.

An early interview with British Vogue had Rodrigo divulging that much of the material operates under a manifesto of ‘sad love songs’, since many of her favourite love songs “had a tinge of fear or yearning in them.” Indeed, though the record is front-loaded with songs devoted to a new lover, they’re not totally clear-eyed or pure. Lead single ‘Drop Dead’, which is wisely selected to open the album, is a good jumping-off point: though the gallop synths and hushed verse vocals convey the butterflies of first dates, the overarching sentiment is one of extremity (perhaps a sentiment that can only be made certain with hindsight). “The most alive I’ve ever been,” she sings, wide-eyed. “But kiss me and I might drop dead.”

It’s a testament to the strength of that chorus melody that, despite it soundtracking every other TikTok on my for-you-page in the last two months, it still sounds as fresh as ever. On this and several songs, she winds increasingly convoluted turns of phrase like bubblegum around soaring melodies (a technique that, it must be said, is incredibly Swiftian). It’s to the benefit of a song like ‘Stupid Song’, whose rather unsubtle imagery (“You’re a spark in the dark and my clothes all caught aflame”) is tied together by a chorus that gives you the gist in its breathlessness and escalating urgency.

Where many of the declarations of love are grounded by worst case scenarios (“And I hope I never see what your face looks like going” on ‘Honeybee’), the best of the first half’s lovesick nuance comes on ‘Maggots For Brains’. The opening lyrics could pass for an ‘Anthems’-like yarn about cabin fever mundanity (“My day is so mundane, I don’t think I left the house / Drank a pot of coffee, tried to write, nothing came out”) until she pours the rug out under us in the chorus: “But that’s just a thing that happens when my […] baby goes away.” Its account of being so obsessed with someone you start seeing the world from their perspective reminds me as much of a Frank O’Hara poem (“It may be the coldest day of / the year, what does he think of / that? I mean, what do I?”) as it does of Sex and the City’s Miranda, upon whom the track is apparently based.

Fascinating, too, are the overt references to Rodrigo’s own biography that avoid easy answers or signalling (see: the “new heights of manhood” on Swift’s ‘Wood’). While allusions to British culture abound—the first mention of Cadbury on a pop album maybe ever?—the best is on ‘Drop Dead’, whose Cure reference (“You know all the words to ‘Just Like Heaven’ / And I know why he wrote them now”) double as a kind of flex that she’s in cahoots with Robert Smith, who’s expressed his adoration for her and guested at her Glastonbury set last year. (He returns the favour by popping up later on ‘What’s Wrong With Me’, a humid, trudging track that winningly marries Rodrigo’s honey-sweet soprano with Smith’s weathered, expressionate husk.)

After ‘Purple’, an angsty cut about relationship doubts that borrows from Halsey’s ‘Colors’ methodology, finishes up act one of the record, we get ‘The Cure’. Christ, what a song. Its dissonant build is redolent of the Foo Fighters’ or the Smashing Pumpkins’ best work, yet it’s also unmistakably hers, with jawdroppers like “Used to play a game in my head when I’d date a guy / Tally up the girls that he fucked ‘til I start to cry.” It’s the song that Rodrigo says helped make the album “click” for her, and it is the emotional fulcrum on which the record tilts and begins, to borrow a sentiment from the song, unravelling.

Then there’s ‘Begged’, a flooring ballad up there with her best work. It’s a study in less being more, a campfire singalong (with Weyes Blood, of all people) with simple, devastating lyrics: “I’m an anchor in the ocean,” she sighs, resigned. “You know I could never leave.” It’s one of several tracks on the record whose sonics tell their own kind of story: clingy ballad ‘Honeybee’ is snowglobe-claustrophobic in the subtle 808s and saccharine choir touch that cleverly undermine the sweetness of its premise. There’s something of Maggie Rogers’ ‘Anywhere With You’ in the boundless, feverish build of ‘Stupid Song’, which glimmers with all the dizzy optimism of nighttime cityscapes. The thrilling ‘My Way’ reminds one of Paramore’s ‘Misery Business’ in both sonics and content, and it’s the punkiest moment on the record.

Still, some of the best is saved for last. ‘Expectations’ is a stunner, a cheesy ‘80s pop song that’s fit for the roller rink as much as wine mom karaoke. It hints at a kind of self-reparation as she declares she’ll have higher standards from now on (and cheekily nods to the cyclical nature of relationships by what sounds like a self-reference: “In a couple months / This man will be the cure!”). Yet, curiously, that optimistic note isn’t the one Rodrigo ends the album on. Instead, we get the five-minute sprawl of ‘Cigarette Smoke’, with its evocative, startling imagery: “It’s bone-dry, bitter and hollow / You’ll be miles away tomorrow.” It’s a potent statement to close the record, a meditation on the lasting damage of even the briefest flicker of relationships.

If she occasionally stumbles with thudding literalism (lines like “some nights can be so fucking lonely” could’ve used some workshopping), she has ten more zingers to compensate (the memories line on ‘Cigarette Smoke’ stopped me in my tracks). You Seem Pretty Sad is overall a confident, engaging body of work from a songwriter truly coming into her own; she’s pulling from her influences and experiences to make something wholly new and original, a work that’s as specific as it is universal. It seems pretty excellent for a girl so early in her career.