Don’t Even Try to Play This Album in the Background
· The Atlantic
At times, the defining mood of the 2020s seems to be disassociation. The culture of these years will be remembered for lots of things that dulled and distracted the senses: easygoing country music, friendly AI chatbots, ketamine nasal sprays, conspiracy theories that were preferable to the truth, and droning podcasts about all of the above. Feeling is out; vibing is in.
But the case against this line of thinking is simple: Olivia Rodrigo.
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In early 2021, the then–Disney star’s single “Drivers License” pierced the pandemic-weary zeitgeist like a geyser in a desert. The song’s soppy piano and screamed choruses served to interrupt the flow of any playlist by triggering the listener’s sympathy and, perhaps, alarm (Is she okay? Am I okay?). Her albums Sour (2021) and Guts (2023) flaunted clever wit and theater-kid poise with adventuresome work from the rock producer Dan Nigro—but the real asset was her ferocity. As she hopped between punk crunchiness and bedroom-pop intimacy, every trembling lyric was backed by palpable, well, guts.
Her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, makes that earlier work sound like kids’ stuff. That’s not to dismiss what she did before—she was bottling a particularly teenage form of spite, hot and thin like boiling water. Now that she’s all of 23 years old, the emotional brew is thicker and even messier. The album narrates what she has called her first “adult” relationship, and it was initially meant to be entirely made up of love songs. Then she and her guy broke up, and the work got darker. The result is a wild listening experience—so intense it verges on sickening.
She’s in unstable territory from the first moments of the lead track, “Drop Dead.” A synth riff evokes the wistfulness of a John Hughes movie, but it’s rhythmically shifty, like she’s about to bolt. Rodrigo sings about a first date in a slithering, secretive tone of voice—then starts stabbing one note over and over for the chorus. The effect is unnervingly happy. One imagines the narrator of the Proclaimers’ most maniacal hit undertaking their 500-mile journey with a double dose of Vyvanse.
Quite soon, Rodrigo is fully crashing out. “I feel right, I feel wrong, I feel totally insane,” she sings on the stunning “Stupid Song,” which sets the honeymoon phase to pulsing piano and galloping drums. The track apes the softly anthemic approach of U2, Coldplay, and the National—until all of that elegant uplift topples like an overly ambitious wedding cake. Next, the ballad “Honeybee” sounds midnight-stark until a choir appears like sudden floodlights, beautiful and harsh. A duo of jangle-pop delicacies, “Maggots for Brains” and “U + Me =