Olivia Rodrigo didn’t fail to deliver emotional whiplash with the release of her highly anticipated album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.
For an artist so closely associated with heartbreak, it was perhaps only a matter of time before Rodrigo turned her attention towards other matters of the heart. For Rodrigo, what has always made her catalogue compelling has never been devastation itself—though it has certainly served as medicine for many nursing a break-up, and there have been a few too many tweets celebrating the end of a relationship just in time for a new Rodrigo album. Rather, it is the emotional extremity with which Rodrigo experiences—and commits—to every moment in love.
The album traces the full arc of a relationship, with a clear narrative from the first-crush jitters of ‘drop dead’ to the slow deterioration that begins, almost imperceptibly, in ‘honeybee’ before reaching an emotional apex in ‘purple’. Much of its success rests on the strength of Rodrigo’s songwriting and the sheer force of its production in collaboration with Dan Nigro, though there are moments where the latter threatens to overpower the distinctiveness of her voice.
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As with most Rodrigo records, the emotional highs are impossibly high. Such is the case with the first 25 minutes of the album. The intensity is so dizzying that it begins to collapse the distance between Rodrigo and her lover altogether, as infatuation and romance reach a point of near-dissolution. On ‘stupid song’, Rodrigo sings, ‘everything I own feels like ours’; by this point, the distinction between “I” and “ours” has all but disappeared. What is meant to be a love song instead delivers as a trojan horse—even at its most euphoric, what is more pronounced is the sense of inevitability that clouds the album. There is never a truthful surrender to love. Another standout is ‘honeybee’, in which Rodrigo dangles the possibility of heartbreak before it has even arrived: “I hope I never see what your face looks like going,” she sings, before following it with a tentative “here’s to hoping”.
This inevitability of heartbreak reveals the album’s central contradiction, and also its most interesting one. As Rodrigo finally writes about being in love, what remains is the realisation that love itself—the fairytale ending, the prize—can be just as destabilising as heartbreak.
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By the time ‘purple’ arrives, there is barely any distinction left between Rodrigo and the object of her affection. It comes at you with relentless fervour, leaves the partnership collapsing upon itself, quite literally, as “I melt with you/You’re red and I’m blue/Now I see the world in purple”. The slick sonic transitions within the song from programmed drums into live ones cement the album’s production capabilities, which stand in their own right outside of the emotional weight of the lyrics.
‘purple’ is an evident turning point, both in terms of Olivia Rodrigo’s wider discography and the narrative of the album, as Rodrigo sheds the primary colour dominating the branding of her first two albums. This is not lost on the artist, who used the violet hue to announce the album through solid-colour murals. The emotional leanings towards sadness rather than anger mark a more mature stage in her songwriting—and even in interviews Rodrigo’s voice seems different, more grown into her sound. The only thing that matters in her grief is herself, and how she is feeling. Rodrigo is at the centre of her own grief.
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The album also brings forth Rodrigo’s first ever collaboration, ‘what’s wrong with me’ alongside The Cure’s Robert Smith. Following the viral duet at Glastonbury for ‘Just Like Heaven’ and ‘Friday I’m In Love’, the collab feels true to Rodrigo’s personal taste and artistic direction—and the marrying of their vocals highlights the delicacy of Rodrigo’s vocal tone.
But it is in ‘less’ that Rodrigo strips things back, revealing some of her most honest writing. “If loving me means letting go and wishing me the best […] I wish you loved me less,” she sings, before landing on the muted disappointment of “We tried to recreate our favourite date / but we didn’t laugh as much this time”.
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The sudden sonic transition from ‘less’ to ‘expectations’ feels exactly like the eureka moment when it all clicks in your head—that the guy wasn’t really worth it at all and you’re released from the shackles of break-up grief. It is only fitting that the latter hones into Rodrigo’s rock-pop dreamscape sound, emerging both lyrically and sonically as one of the strongest songs on the album. Rodrigo surprises here, with a voice synth moment, echoing earlier sonic textures on the record such as the synth electric guitar in ‘stupid song’—imbuing a new stamp in the singer’s sound.
It is a privilege to love so deeply and to have been loved in return—but ultimately it is a reflection of our own capacity to care for someone else. The most enduring quality about Rodrigo’s catalogue—and one undoubtedly proven again with this record— is her earnestness to love deeply, whether or not it ends in heartbreak.
