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.
Olivia Rodrigo: You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love
