Olivia Rodrigo: why her new album is a success

Olivia Rodrigo, 23, released her 3rd album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. image: getty

While we thought we were listening to a forced marriage between the highway pop of Taylor Swift and the H&M rock of Avril Lavigne, Olivia Rodrigo is in reality more complex and talented than the industry wanted to sell her to us. His latest album, simmering over low heat, is a subtle success.

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We met her for the first time at the bend of Good For Uin May 2021. A little despite ourselves. She was eighteen years and three months old. Almost rock chorus, screaming voice, cheerleader costume, pouting pout. Another Avril Lavigne? A new Britney Spears who would have invited electric guitars to scare herself? Yes, it was a bit vagrant, but as a good pre-boomer that we are today, we were already no longer the target audience.

Not to mention that Olivia Rodrigo ticked all the boxes of the very young feminine marketing product, unfortunately catapulted and sexualized by the Disney team since the dawn of time.

However, like the Foreign Legion, Disney sometimes allows you to build a mind of steel, as long as you emerge unscathed. After showing off his face in the series Frankie and Paige et High School Musicalthe young Californian clenched her fists and realized her true childhood dream: to sing. And the one who won’t be wrong at all at the time is Dan Nigro. The producer of the very profitable Pink Pony Club de Chappell Roan slipped a DM to Olivia in 2020, “completely denied” by the lady of Happier dropped naively on Instagram.

Result, a first album, Sourwhich is spreading across the planet in 2021. The success is immediate, logical, phenomenal. The most streamed album of the year. THE teens people from all over the world fall in love with this new voice which knows how to tell (and survive) the pain of first romantic breakups.

An old comment posted under the video Good 4 U perfectly sums up the rainbow of feelings that she is capable of transforming into melodies: “With Driver’s license she was sad, then with deja vu she was frustrated and now she is mean. I love it.”

For our part, we should have been more attentive. From the start. First clue: Olivia Rodrigo signed her first juicy contract with Geffen, the record company which notably propagated Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Weezer and Hole (Courtney Love’s group, which Olivia worships). If she always accepted her crush for Taylor Swift, she was especially lulled by the distortion and girl rock of nineties. And it’s not for lack of having repeated it in the slightest interview.

Olivia Rodrigo’s first two albums obviously didn’t have the sonic dirtiness of a Smells Like Teens Spiritbut the grunge heart of Olivia Rodrigo (de-) fought despite everything under the heavy layer of pop varnish, so dear to the modern industry.

Second clue. Demanding reviews have already given him honorable marks for his second album. Guts.

Come on, let’s be frank: we didn’t hate the music of this precociously gifted kid who had been “60% deaf in her left ear since childhood.” To say that we listened to his many successive hits with shame is much more honest. Like a certain wave of artists sometimes nicknamed disney punk in the 2000s (hello Blink-182), there is a communicative energy brewing there.

And the fan number one by Alanis Morissette perfectly embodied this All-American Bitch that youth needs to leap into adulthood with as few scrapes as possible. Her last romantic-vengeful rock charge dates from 2024, when she will release Obsessed, a punk and teasing hit written with the incredible American artist St-Vincent.

Probably the best bit of his career.

June 2026, at 23, the star pulls the handbrake and tries her hand at a love song. Still with Dan Nigro at the helm, Olivia Rodrigo has just been released you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. An album that feels the butterflies in the stomach, the sweet unreality, the words that are not enough to say “I love you”, the wavering of the first moments. Well… until halfway through the disc. Afterwards? The fall and the harsh reality, those that she knows how to tell so well when tears are so many blades in the heart.

An album like a terribly perfect loop, a concept in thirteen songs, for the most part very restrained, which abandons the rock of the nineties to curl up in the new wave of the previous decade. After the disappointment of this noisy absence of cheeky guitars, you have to simmer this new main course over very low heat to begin to appreciate it.

It’s stupid to say for a 23-year-old artist, but Olivia Rodrigo has matured. His voice too. Even more precise. Deeper and more confident. The love ballad Honeybeealmost whispered on the shoulder of the lucky person, is touching as can be.

La caution Robert Smith

More importantly, Olivia Rodrigo has undoubtedly realized one of her most cherished fantasies with this third album. Invite the legend Robert Smith to sing a song on What’s wrong with me. A surprise which had been half-deflowered in 2025, when the pop star invited his “always hero” to the Glastonbury stage to share the hit Friday I’m in Love de The Cure.

An almost absurd duo on paper, and which could even pass for a fabricated rock endorsement, if she were not a sincere fan of the famous British. Since her first pop-punk stirrings, she doesn’t need anyone’s validation to prove that she has things to say in her own way.

This new album, densely orchestrated, more intimate and less obvious, where we sometimes come across his own memories of the Smashing Pumpkins or Foo Fighters, offers us some assurance that his career is not launched full throttle on the road to a success written in advance by jaded producers.

Olivia Rodrigo, with Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey, is undoubtedly the wide-angle pop that American youth most deserve today. And everyone else no longer has to deny their pleasure.