Olivia Rodrigo
You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love
GEFFEN
Lately I’ve been reading interviews with Robert Smith from throughout the period of The Cure’s rise in the ’80s, and a big part of that curiosity was sparked by Olivia Rodrigo’s artistic admiration for Smith. In 1989, after a decade of songwriting, Smith finally felt comfortable being direct and unguarded about love. Discussing the track “Lovesong” from their then-new album Disintegration, he said that “it’s an open show of emotion. It’s not trying to be clever. It’s taken me ten years to reach the point where I feel comfortable singing a very straightforward love song.” Fast-forward to 2026 and the 67-year-old Smith has been won over by Rodrigo’s ability to jump into writing about the torment and ecstasy of love with such acute sensitivity at the age of 23—the same age Smith was when The Cure dropped Pornography.
Rodrigo showed that ability immediately with her first two albums, 2021’s GRAMMY-winning Sour and 2023’s triple-platinum GUTS. She remains one of the most gifted chroniclers of Gen-Z romance, but her themes are timeless and often hit Gen-X audiences and Millennials just as hard. Love, after all, is timeless, from sobbing on the curb at LAX to awkwardly caressing a lover’s hand in the dark of a movie theater for the first time. Her smash-hit early singles “Drivers License” and “Good 4 U” both channeled the ache of watching a former lover embracing a new life and a new girl. Like Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift, Rodrigo also knows how to twist the knife with a top-shelf diss track. Just listen to “Vampire” and “Get Him Back!” for a little dose of that rugburn sentiment.
Side A of her thrilling third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, is rainbows and carving “U + Me = <3” into car seat leather. Side B is doubt, regret, and the lingering memory of cigarette smoke when the second car leaves the house. Rodrigo opens the record with lead single “Drop Dead,” in which she compares a guy in line for the bathroom at a bar to an “angel on the walls of Versailles”—an early preview of how head-over-heels in love she is throughout these early-album songs (The Cure would surely be proud). On third single “Stupid Song,” she’s deliriously lovesick, describing her condition as a spark in the dark with his clothes all aflame, a car with the brake lines cut, or a heart made of wax melting in the sun. One of the best lines (of many) on the album occurs on this track as doubts creep in: “You should feel how I feel when somebody says your name.”
The lovesick feelings continue on the showtune track “Honeybee,” a readymade summer wedding song for the brave and self-actualized among us. The creepy and euphoric “Maggots for Brains” casts Rodrigo as a girl so infatuated that it’s made her feel like “a zombie in [her] body,” and it’s one song of many that leans hard into the new-wave aesthetic of The B-52’s, Devo, and New Order. The most surprising bridges, choruses, and outros all touch on this ’80s era, but side A’s sleeper highlight is the beautiful, Laufey-esque piano ballad, “Less.” With longtime producer Dan Nigro, Rodrigo pulls in ’90s mall pop, folk-rock, and synthesizer elements to make the absence of pure-punk electricity less harsh. Final side-A track “Purple” mixes folk and electronica elements to transition to the decaying portion of the album.
Side B kicks off with “The Cure,” which is propelled by an alt-rock acoustic guitar strongly reminiscent of Foo Fighters or The Smashing Pumpkins that accompanies Rodrigo’s realization that a partner won’t fix what’s broken inside of her. Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” also gets a nod on the exquisite album closer, “Cigarette Smoke,” where all she asks for are the memories to click off like a light switch in an empty house. Earlier, on “Begged,” she mines the exhaustible limits of romantic grace. In retrospect, the album’s seemingly jubilant early cuts harbor creeping shadows, presaging an inevitable collapse.
It’s fitting that Robert Smith—pop’s reigning laureate of ecstatic despair—hovers over the LP like a ghost. His DNA bleeds through the overt nods of “Drop Dead” and “Purple,” culminating in their devastating late-album duet “What’s Wrong with Me.” Here, two generations of heartbreak harmonize on the fatalism of romance, embracing love as a beautiful sickness. “My head is spinning, and my stomach is sick,” they sing, luxuriating in the vertigo. As Smith once observed of “Pictures of You,” “We often fall for the frozen illusion of a lover rather than their reality.” On You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, Rodrigo channels a similar cognitive dissonance, tearing down the fantasies of romance until only an exquisite, spinning ache remains, like a trace of cigarette smoke hanging in the air.
