She opens on a staccato flanged bass before synths bounce in. The first thing you register isn’t a lyric – it’s a decade, specifically one Rodrigo (and myself) are too young to remember. Olivia’s doubled vocals swell through the verses into a thick foliage of harmonies. Taylor Swift’s influence over Rodrigo’s sound fades away sometime around the second chorus of the opening song. You realise this album is a departure. The twenty-first century has been nursing a fascination with New Wave, and Rodrigo’s embrace of the sound is a convincing argument for why we keep returning to it.
This is pop perfection. “Perfection” is the kind of word that ought to disqualify the person saying it. But Rodrigo’s ability to land across generations is so well-documented it deserved its own sketch on Saturday Night Live before she was old enough to rent a car. Beyond why this concept album works, the question remains: why does a record this sad make you feel this good?
The album is split into “Girl So in Love” (Side A) and “You Seem Pretty Sad” (Side B). Sequenced as the slow dissolution of a relationship, every time I listen I find myself playing it in the exact order it was presented. It was programmed too intentionally for me to jump around. The optimistic ballads aren’t a weaker prelude to a more emotional back half; they’re the necessary setup the wound requires. Joy has to be built before it can curdle. Neither half of the album makes sense without the other. Still, I enjoyed Act Two more than Act One.
“Stupid Song” came to Rodrigo after she read Annie Ernaux’s book Simple Passion. In 2022, Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The book – filed under memoir or autofiction, as Ernaux actively resists the term “novel” – follows an affair that fails to make Annie feel happy and instead leaves her overcome with longing and obsession. A love song engineered to undermine its own sweetness through irony, the song resents itself. Its obvious stepfather is Paul McCartney’s “Silly Love Songs,” which Wings released in the seventies as a rebuttal to critics who said Paul wrote too many of them. Here, Olivia is trying to tame her own enthusiasm.
The world needs Olivia to keep writing love songs. When “honeybee” arrives, by the fourth time I heard it I found myself recalling a relationship that hadn’t gotten the conclusion I felt it deserved – and it brought me to tears. There’s a specific kind of moment, when your own feelings already sit at the edge of oblivion, where the wrong song at the right time will tear you apart. “Honeybee” is just that wrong song – lush with strings and choral swells that perfectly reflect your wish that the joys from connection could last forever. The tenderness of it is almost unfair.
“Maggots for Brains” lives in the same neighbourhood as Chairlift or LCD Soundsystem without ever tipping fully into techno-pop. Rodrigo’s voice, which can do almost anything, stays restrained in service of the larger palette. Here, the album hands you its first transcendent outro: a closing build that reaches far past all the music that came before it. Olivia’s outros showcase her most interesting work, where melodies bloom into shapes that let her voice off its leash.
“U + me = <3” runs her internet-native sensibility through New Wave guitars. The friction between the two is a marriage of childlike text messages over nostalgic post-punk shimmer. The narrator admits she’s getting too far ahead of herself. Against caution, she persists.
“My Way” is reminiscent of La Roux and millennial uptempo dance-punk. It employs Rodrigo’s trademark irony to clarify where we are in the story’s concept:
‘And here’s the part where the girl gets pissed
And the girl is me, did you get that hint?‘
While “My Way” is a great track, it’s when we get to “Purple” that we enter something of a generational run of consistently good music.
Kanye West asks in the song “530 (The Car Missing)”: ‘Why when somebody break your heart, it helps fix your vision?”
Rodrigo manages to find the answer in “Purple”:
‘It’s a small world
When it only can revolve around us two
It’s crazy
I had big dreams ’til I tied myself to you‘
The Cure haunts this album. Beyond the guitar tone and the song titled “the cure,” (somewhat coincidentally?) Rodrigo’s standout moment is “what’s wrong with me,” a duet with Robert Smith himself.
Smith’s voice on this record made me cry – right here, while I was compiling notes for this review. Most duets are implied love songs. This one isn’t. Smith isn’t playing a partner; he functions as a psychopomp, the figure from mythology who escorts a soul through the underworld. The song leans all the way into that Jungian reading: an elder is summoned to help the hero unpack the internal wreckage she can’t navigate alone. There are limits to the ego. The psychopomp fills in those gaps.
The Cure were punk pioneers built around a refusal to conform to an apocalyptic world. There’s undeniable poetry to his presence here. The closest analogue I can find is Daft Punk’s “Touch” from Random Access Memories, where Paul Williams joined the duo to produce something genuinely sublime. Much of pop music is about rejecting your parents, but “what’s wrong with me” is an inter-generational work that’ll outlive most of what comes out this year. It sounds like a father helping his daughter navigate the difficult work of finding love.
I’m thirty-one, which means I didn’t grow up idolising The Cure. I had Radiohead to scratch that particular itch. I’ve only started working through Smith’s catalogue recently. Rodrigo and Nigro are in open dialogue with the classic rock of our fathers and the toxic sons they produced, and she’s filtered that sound through a contemporary sensibility that manages to be specific but mainstream all at once. Another ballad that achieves this same intergenerational dynamic to great effect is Mark Ronson’s “Somebody to Love Me,” where Boy George delivers the best vocals he’ll give in his entire career outside “Karma Chameleon.”
After “what’s wrong with me,” the track “Begged” outruns Rodrigo’s experience. You might be forty and walking out of a divorce and still identify with the story she’s telling. This young person’s account of grief leaves room in it for everyone older.
We retreat into music. It’s where my emotions can find a space to place themselves, where mere words won’t do. What a strange irony for a writer. I’ve gone back and forth on how to write this. There was a version with a lot more research – more time on The Cure’s discography, more careful retrospection lining this album up against Sour and Guts. I decided instead to be honest about how the music made me feel rather than show you how smart I am, because the second thing is a performance and the first is the real reason we need to listen to music.
Let’s speak bluntly: Rodrigo’s lyrics have a way of implicating the male listener, handing you a mirror that forces you to interrogate your own bad behaviour. I spent this album sorting through complicated feelings about women, friends, exes, people I used to love, and revisiting stretches of my life when I felt love more strongly, when I had the luxury of time and the capacity to make space for it. Where Taylor Swift tends to settle for the surface of an archetype, Rodrigo uses texture and harmony to build characters, and some of her characters wear my bad behaviours.
Under the yearning that soaks the album’s blue hues and tones, there’s a Jungian shape, where Olivia is fractured by a relationship she loses herself inside of. By the album’s end, she comes out the far side with a firmer sense of who she is. At fifty minutes, this is a substantial body of work that plays lean since every track is built with enough care to stand as a self-contained journey of its own.
The title of the album is Fiona Apple levels of overlong, so when I needed to remind myself what it was, I had to ask myself what it meant. Perhaps her friend asked an uncomfortable truth: If this is so great, why are you shrinking? I think Olivia is smarter than that, analysing her own sadness in real time, recognising that the “big dreams” she sacrificed were traded for a trap. She is both the patient and the therapist.
‘you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love’ is out now via Geffen Records
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