Fans come to Rodrigo to give a voice to their most uncomfortable feelings. So even if the story this time is a rosy meet-cute instead of her usual agony, a maximalist, accessible sound and a dollop of heart-stopping drama are tenets for her now.
Photo: Olivia Rodrigo via YouTube
The video for Olivia Rodrigo’s new single, “Drop Dead,” finds the 23-year-old ex-Disney singer-songwriter frolicking in the Palace of Versailles like the Louvre run in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 French New Wave classic Bande à part. It’s the kind of dance routine you get from an animated princess after she meets her future king consort, all surreptitious twirling but delivered in a baby-doll dress Courtney Love might’ve shred in the ’90s. The lead single off Rodrigo’s forthcoming third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, immediately teases this project’s story: She’s spending a lot of time in Europe nauseatingly falling for a local and the nearby culture; she doesn’t make it out of the first verse before name-checking “Just Like Heaven” by the Cure, the flagship act of Britain’s hopeless romantic, Robert Smith. The song details the chase it took to meet her suitor as well as the mountain of plans that congeals in her head as the ocean-crossed lovers become entangled.
Rodrigo is turning a new corner for her lead singles, which have previously positioned her as someone terrible things happen to. In her 2021 breakthough “Drivers License,” she cruises past the street of the ex who dumped her for someone else, and in 2023’s scathing “Vampire,” she rails against a “bloodsucker, fame fucker” who gloms onto younger girls. “Drop Dead” inverts the power dynamic: Rodrigo is excited about getting what she wants but is still finding a way to ache.
The lyrics of “Drop Dead” speak to a new level of agency for Rodrigo as a lover and writer (“One night I was bored in bed / And stalked you on the internet”). They brim with the world-traveler ethos of someone who last summer wrapped over a year of arena dates, on tour for her 2023 sophomore album, Guts. They also speak to her new level of celebrity. The Cure reference (“You know all the words to ‘Just Like Heaven’ / And I know why he wrote them / Now that you’re standin’ right here”) is notable because Smith and Rodrigo are actually friends who performed that song together at Glastonbury last year. Shooting the video at Versailles and making an offer to her lover in verse two to travel the world (“I got chewing gum and a bunch of stuff I’d like to know / Like, have you ever been to Japan? Or taken that Eurostar to France?”) are A-lister flexes. That all feels fresh for Rodrigo, who seems to be walking us into an account of her relationship with the British actor Louis Partridge after a breakup late last year.
Rodrigo escapes the country for a spell but doesn’t shake the pop sheen and self-loathing of her debut album, Sour, or Guts’s rock-and-roll cameo-filled tour. “Dead” is a strutting synth-pop single interrupted by a fuzzy rock bridge pointing to the zestier single this could have been (or a deeper future rock dive). The punchier and dancier aspects that gently elbow into Guts and The Rise of a Midwest Princess producer Dan Nigro’s pure pop seem gleaned from touring her hits alongside a cohort of pop stars and alt-rock vets like the Breeders. Happiness is the theme, but the mortal anguish of earlier songs like the wounded “Traitor” and “The Grudge” remains in the picture. She could die if she doesn’t get a kiss. “Drop Dead” is a Stateside rejoinder to the Englishman-in–New York aesthetic of Harry Styles’s dance-rock makeover; this Angeleno’s heart lies 5,000 miles away from her body in London, so she’s dressing her music in orchestral flourishes and monarchic largesse. The two pop stars angle to delicately rough up their sound this year without losing fans from an album or two ago.
Rodrigo and Nigro offer just flashes of genres further afield of their repertoire, because there are expectations to meet. Jagged, painful love songs endeared Rodrigo to millions. Fans come to her to give voice to their most uncomfortable feelings, so even if the story this time is a rosy meet-cute instead of her usual agony, a maximalist, accessible sound and a dollop of heart-stopping drama are tenets for her now. It connects, but it’s a bit obvious.
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