Even when the ’80s-rock experiments don’t land, she remains an effective storyteller of heartbreak on You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.
Photo: Olivia Rodrigo via YouTube
The third album from a major commodity in mainstream music is a massive test. A breakthrough debut introduces an artist’s character and pet sounds that, with luck, get refined on a sophomore album. If their next outing doesn’t keep carefully evolving, they can get branded a one-trick pony, but pushing the envelope too far can alienate day-one fans. Celebrity Skin (1998), Hole’s third studio album, neatened up Courtney Love’s sound and image after her Golden Globe nom for The People vs. Larry Flynt, exchanging the guttural shrieks and tattered garb of her early-’90s oeuvre for sleeker pop-rock hooks and chic threads. Fans and critics met her pivot with begrudging respect, thanks to the strength of the album’s melodies. Olivia Rodrigo is a student of Love and her ilk who has been riding high off the one-two punch of 2021’s Sour and 2023’s Guts, chart-toppers dually indebted to modern pop and ’90s grunge. You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the 23-year-old singer’s latest, dodges the third-album conundrum of whether to embrace sweeping change. Rodrigo delicately rearranges the ideas that animated her first two albums.
Sad doesn’t ditch the balladry and brusque rockers that yielded hits like the hushed “Drivers License” and the harsh “Brutal.” Instead, it bakes the usual ingredients of a Rodrigo work — fluttering vocals, feelings of abandonment, occasional fuzz tones — down into a more cohesive confection of bittersweet, maximalist pop-rock that largely borrows from the ’80s. It’s an autobiographical concept album about the thrills and chills of life with a partner who turned out to be a mismatch. Less reliant on abrasive rock tones, her sound loses some urgency, but she fights to make up for the album’s more restrained approach with laser-guided storytelling. Sad may not reach the heights of her previous projects, but it is a ferocious showcase of her strengths.
Rodrigo admitted in a recent interview that she wasn’t excited by rock in a “traditional” sense this cycle, after sparking controversy for wearing baby-doll dresses at one of her concerts and on Sad’s album cover. Accused of courting Loli creeps, the singer stressed she was paying homage to forebears like Love. Grunge and riot grrrl vets were merchants of social commentary, steeped in a typically ’90s disdain for subtlety, on having to grow up too quickly to navigate a world of predatory men. That Rodrigo’s tribute to these pioneers went over as an act of titillating horny anonymous men shows how male agency takes priority over other perspectives even when people think they’re behaving in a woman’s best interest. It also shows how, as effusively as Rodrigo advertises her admiration for the likes of Hole and Weezer, she is still understood as a pop property and Taylor Swift successor. Sad’s sonic points of reference notably aren’t “kinderwhore” staples like Hole or Babes in Toyland, so any critique and defenses of Rodrigo’s right to (or obligation not to) engage in sporadic Courtney Love cosplay now look funny in the light of Sad’s softer scope. And Rodrigo’s poise comes off like a coping mechanism for the think-piece storms set off by her every movement; this third album is an evolution too delicate to ruffle many feathers but nevertheless caused a stir.
Sad balances piano-pop pomp, extravagant alt-rock, and cinematic serenading. With a craggier vocal, the boisterous lead single “Drop Dead!” could pass for Arcade Fire. The Montreal unit’s polyphonic overload is useful to Rodrigo lyrics about being overwhelmed by attraction, to the head rush of a kiss and the swirl of possibilities it could lead to. Elsewhere, the tender “Honeybee” lays a precious, Lorde-like delivery on too thick to re-create starry-eyed pillow talk — “Shooting stars, racing cars / Everything I own just feels like ours” — and the elegant breakup ballad “Less” takes after Disney Princess songs, using regal, ascending notes to wish the dream guy didn’t fall for her. Sad’s louder, leaner songs land as grating in their company: “My Way” and “Expectations” crank up the angst and distortion, but both tracks seem perfunctory and inessential to the main story, as though her heart really isn’t in shredding right now but she still had to satiate “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl” fans. The most exciting thing “Expectations” has going for it is a chunky bass tone that recalls the ’70s masterworks of New Wave titans Ric Ocasek and Gary Numan.
Sad’s narrative, seemingly inspired by Rodrigo’s two-year romance with English actor Louis Partridge, is alluring. It plays with our image of the singer as the jilted flame and plaintiff of “Drivers License,” “Traitor,” and “Vampire,” a person awful things continue to happen to despite noble intentions. Here, Rodrigo accepts some responsibility for a broken bond by setting up impossibly giddy and borderline irrational paeans to stalking a crush and obsessing about him through the day. She slowly lives to regret such behavior, coming to terms with the reality that her beau is not the prince who was promised. Songs in which love is fizzling challenge the wisdom of songs about the chase. “The Cure” reckons with problems a boyfriend can’t fix — “But it don’t matter how your love feels anymore / It will never be the cure” — before the closer “Cigarette Smoke” suggests their failure to live up to storybook ideals. The latter song’s chorus — “I thought that we played the perfect couple / ’Til you didn’t want the part” — can be read as a fuck-you or as a wounded reappraisal of the scatterbrained glee of earlier cuts like “Maggots for Brains,” an upbeat take on the Cure’s “A Forest” that can’t wait to paraphrase Sex and the City’s Miranda Hobbes: “And everything that’s funny, I wish I could tell to him.” Rodrigo is so spellbound in the bustling “U + Me = Bad idea, right? Do we really want what Miranda and Steve had?
Cuts like “Maggots for Brains” and “U+ Me = In Between Days” to “Maggots”’s “A Forest.” The happy Cure-type beats are cozier fits for Sad’s traditional pop-star fare (like the shouty, wordy, Swifty third single, “Stupid Song”) than Guts’s disorienting mix of snarling slacker-rock excellence and sorrowful cooing. Rodrigo gets that the Cure’s catalogue is home to countless formidable pop songs, but “Maggots” and “Head on the Door simulacra to honor goth romantic Robert Smith; his other admirers include Chino Moreno of Deftones and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, who don’t much sound like Smith or each other. Circling Smith’s ’80s work keeps Sad on trend with 2020s pop’s forever fixation on Reagan-era musical real estate. Sad is an across-the-pond rejoinder to Plastic Hearts, Miley Cyrus’s 2020 ode to Joan Jett and Stevie Nicks, or a London-in-the-’80s alternative to the Paris-in-the-’80s pining on Doja Cat’s 2025 full length, Vie. Sad is better than both those albums, but by hook or by crook, we find our way back to 1980-something.
Deep in Sad’s volley of pure-pop reverie and New Wave period pieces, “What’s Wrong With Me” delivers a shining exercise in the reflexivity that has endeared Rodrigo to young fans and rock elders. The actual Robert Smith guests on the song after mutual words of admiration and surprise collaborations at Glastonbury 2025 and Primavera Sound 2026. “Wrong” is a cartoonishly forlorn, disconcertingly peppy duet that tracks the disintegration of a relationship in tinny programmed drums and synth notes. The vocalists check off a list of possible sources of a malaise until they land on her significant other, serving desolation in the aesthetics of wedding-singer routines. You could totally slip “Wrong” onto a Cure album in the era that produced the strutting “Let’s Go to Bed,” but it doesn’t want to be “Let’s Go to Bed.” The song is a study in subtlety and irony, a coming-of-age story with an old soul’s flair for decades-old sounds. It contains wholesome ’60s girl-group lyrics — “Went to the doctor and she said I was fine / But every movie that I see makes me cry” — rendered in kitschy ’80s production behind ’90s-themed album art. Pairing time-displaced tastes and dour earnestness is distinctly Rodrigo.
“Wrong” lets Smith play a handful of instruments, cutting into Sour, Guts, and Sad producer Dan Nigro’s orchestral heft for a less bombastic mix that doesn’t seem slight. “Purple,” another gem, pulls Jim-E Stack (Bon Iver, Lorde, Charli XCX) in as a utility player for a showcase of Rodrigo’s varied skill set that’s begging to be a centerpiece on her next tour. “Purple” creeps patiently from one end of the singer’s creative spectrum to the other, delivering a barnstorm rock highlight that presents at first as another bit of bubbly pure-pop swooning. The soft, smooth track methodically swells with big riffs and drum fills as Rodrigo joyfully croons the titular line: “I see the world in purple.” The lyric is about a boy — “I melt with you, your red and my blue,” the previous line goes — but it doubles as a metaphor for her overarching career. Rodrigo is a role model who swears and a pop icon who sneers. She refuses to choose a side in the ongoing wars over how she should sound, dress, and speak. Her catalogue shines specifically because it rebuffs the never-ending rock-vs.-pop horse racing faced by predecessors like Celebrity Skin. But as much as Sad succeeds at coolly reconciling the two wings of Rodrigo’s music, its towering team-ups with musicians other than Nigro quietly call for a fourth album with a more varied cast.
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