Let’s start with a basic, fundamental truth: The new Olivia Rodrigo album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, is good, potentially even great in the right light. I listened to it while walking around my neighborhood, swaying on the subway, driving to the beach on a perfect 80-degree Saturday. The music fits so beautifully into daily life—the swell of emotion, Rodrigo’s sweeping melodies, and that specific vein of ’80s new wave and post-punk that conjures coming-of-age movie credits.
You Seem Pretty Sad… is cohesive, conceptual, and just alternative enough to stand out in a pop landscape that has grown more crowded, and more country-influenced, than when Rodrigo dropped her last album, Guts, in 2023. Pitchfork gave the new album an 8.3. And sonically, it is the best Rodrigo has ever sounded, with just the right slate of musical references to match; the collaboration between Rodrigo and her producer Dan Nigro has reached a very intuitive level that might be their best work to date.
Which makes it all the more perplexing that lyrically, this is possibly Rodrigo’s least successful album, or maybe the least specific, to date. It almost feels like the instrumentation is hiding certain flaws in the lyrics, pushing the listener to just roll with lines that are either cheesy or vague and not look too hard at the gaps. For every line that is legitimately thoughtful or wrenching, like “I have this thought when I lay in bed at night / That I feel trapped inside my life,” from “Begged,” or most of “The Cure,” there are those that feel trite, repetitive of past work, or just off. For example, from the song “Purple,” “And I melt with you, your red and my blue / Now I see the world in purple,” or yet another nod to the idea that Rodrigo feels deeply uncool in a room full of cool girls on “Stupid Song.” She loves a driving-through-the-city metaphor, but used it more effectively on “Drivers License” and “Making the Bed.”
Rodrigo’s career highlights have often been preceded by her reference points, from the Taylor Swift and Paramore credit fiasco with her debut album Sour, to the Riot Grrl and Avril Lavigne-heavy Guts, to the discourse about her baby-doll dresses—which she pointedly and effectively called out in her Popcast interview—dresses she said were intended to be odes to Courtney Love or Kathleen Hanna, in the lead-up to this record.
Rodrigo has mostly been able to keep these reference points, real and imagined, from overwhelming her music and public performance. She is not a mere copy-paste of another artist; she has a distinctive voice with a distinctive perspective. The issue, though, is that this perspective is blurry on You Seem Pretty Sad. It’s possible some of this is intentional. The obsessive, all-consuming love that the album traces has erased some of what made her her, at least temporarily. (Think: “I had big dreams 'til I tied myself to you” on “Purple.”) There is something sort of lost when you give yourself over to someone else so entirely. Some of the light goes out of you.
But a song like “Honeybee” tells on itself a bit, with the chorus lyric, “And it's too hard to describe this / In a way that feels honest.” That is the job of a writer, to put into words what feels abstract or overwhelming. Plus, Rodrigo has already used this trick in a more playful way on Guts, with the cheeky “Can't think of a third line, la la la la la la” on “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl.” She also re-uses some cliches: For instance, her female object of jealousy on this album also “lingers in the air like bad perfume,” as did the subject of “Lacy” on Guts. These get played by the fandom as Genius annotations, proof she’s making some kind of intentional callback, but maybe they’re more signs of the lyrics being kind of an afterthought to the overall energy on this album.
Perhaps it’s because of Rodrigo’s reputation as a certain type of songwriter that the stakes feel a bit higher here (and, of course, there are innumerable ways to be a good songwriter that don’t involve complex, highly detailed lyrics). Maybe it’s the continued effects of child stardom, that weird phenomenon in which kids learn early that playing adult, and assimilating into some level of respectability, is a survival tactic. But on You Seem Pretty Sad For a Girl So in Love, it’s hard to conceptualize Rodrigo’s worldview outside of a few moments scattered across songs, like on “Begged,” or the excellent “Maggots for Brains”—“I'm a zombie in my body, I'm a train off of the track / I feel dirty, I feel rotten, and the colors are all flat.” The line in “Cigarette Smoke” that has her admit, “I regret you and what I let slide.”
The lack of consistent lyrical precision—not in the Swiftian paternity-test way, but rather a sharp, memorable image—is most apparent on “My Way,” a supposed kiss-off to a woman who has overstayed her welcome. But the most damning thing Rodrigo can bring herself to say about the woman is that she’s “being f*cking weird.” It’s unfortunate that the post-“Misery Business”/“Better Than Revenge” guilt has resulted in a watering down of what women are allowed to say about other women.
These are not—to be absolutely clear—fatal flaws. I loved so much of this album; I think I’ll only love it more as time goes on. “Expectations” rocks. “U + Me = <3” is so earnest and hopeful I want to live inside it. But I do think that, up to this point, one of Olivia Rodrigo’s greatest songwriting strengths has been her straightforward, quick-witted way of seeing the world for what it is. I hate to see the sharp edges get blunted so early. I hate to think that’s what happens when we grow up.
