"My god, love's embarrassing as hell," Olivia Rodrigo sang on her sophomore album Guts, inviting listeners, her voice dripping with self-deprecation, to "just watch as I crucify myself, for some weird, second string loser who's not worth mentioning."
Unfortunately love is embarrassing, but it might be potentially more so for a singer-songwriter who has publicly dissected her romantic mistakes in near-real time since the age of 17. At times those missteps have been devastating, like a teenaged break-up that inspired her 2021 breakout hit "Drivers License." Or they've been rage-inducing, such as when Rodrigo skewered a villainous "fame f*****" older ex who bled her dry on "Vampire." Sometimes her mistakes are just fun, like the conflicted bad girl energy of songs like "get him back!" and "bad idea right?", with Rodrigo chasing more "second string losers" because, well, sometimes they're hot and really good kissers, what else is there to explain?
Rodrigo's new album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, is the story of one big mistake. It details in chronological order the disintegration of her first, self-described "real, big girl" relationship, from those swoony first dates to feelings of alienation in a dynamic that's clearly wrong for her. For months the gossip blogs rumored that Rodrigo, now 23, had intended to release an album fully committed to telling a love story, but had to rework the album after a publicized breakup. As she described it in a recent Popcast interview, Rodrigo had written most of the album's first half of the record, before writing the breakup songs that close it and editing the entire project to fit together. "We had the fun challenge of going back and actually tweaking some of the love songs on the record and making them a little more honest and more sad and creepy," she said. In an age where relationships and break-ups are immortalized on carefully curated social media profiles for everyone to consume, and young women avoid posting their boyfriends lest a break-up happen, that kind of reclamation has real world appeal.
But it's not an enviable task, nor one made any easier considering the success of its predecessor. Guts was a strong sophomore album. It complicated and admirably matured Rodrigo's melodramatic, theater kid streak as a songwriter and performer, born from her tween years as a star on Disney Channel shows. It also, frequently, rocked, pulling from grungy '90s rock textures and pop punk that so many artists in Rodrigo's pop cohort steer clear from. But above all it sharpened Rodrigo's ability to mine her romantic life and youthful insecurities, from body dysmorphia to social anxiety, with a thrilling sense of wit, self-awareness and even rage. For every skin-crawlingly bad relationship or social interaction documented in her music, Rodrigo emerges unscathed to pen it all down, a pop star final girl for the horror movie that is young womanhood.
The subject matter of you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, in comparison, is much smaller than Guts in scope, and its tone less angsty. The first half of the album commits to a depiction of an absolutely obsessive love that sometimes verges on the cartoonish. "Kiss me and I might drop dead," Rodrigo sings on the album's opener, equating her man's features to those of the angels gracing the walls of the Palace of Versailles. "I'm a car speeding down the boulevard without a brake… I'm a heart made of wax and I'm melting in the sun," she declares on "stupid song," her voice rising in intensity as she lists all the ways she feels "right, wrong, totally insane." Twice, separately, she references her inability to fully describe what this love feels like in a way that does it justice. On "purple," she sings of wanting to melt together "'til it all turns black." Throughout, Rodrigo ditches the punchy, aggressive pop punk of Guts and plays with a soft '80s pop and New Wave-indebted sound, injecting the DNA of Debbie Harry's confrontational snarl into songs like the jealous "My Way," or borrowing the sweeping, dramatic dream pop of The Cure's most romantic numbers on "u + me = <3."
All consuming love like this is a relatively new subject for an artist known for her cutting response songs aimed at exes, though anyone who heard the Guts B-side "so american," with its hedging "I might just be in love" refrain, shouldn't be surprised. But the melodramatic tone of you seem pretty sad's first half gets repetitive. Perhaps the songs' schmaltz is the result of Rodrigo and her longtime collaborator Dan Nigro tinkering with them in the aftermath of the record's new breakup context, opting for the most exaggerated version of Rodrigo's romance as to better pre-salt the wound to come in the album's latter half. But the music doesn't land as anything but earnest. There are moments where the album does embody that goal, like the creepy "maggots for brains," which casts Rodrigo as someone so in love it's made her feel like "a zombie in [her] body." But not even an image of her carving her and her lover's initials into the leather of a carseat can roughen up the sticky sweet, Hallmark Card chorus of "u + me = <3": "You plus me equals a heart forever!"
You might expect the album's second side to swerve towards the big, cathartic, wounded hits Rodrigo's most known for. But a dark malaise permeates most of you seem pretty sad's latter half, mirroring the slow disintegration of her relationship. "I have this thought when I lay in bed at night, that I feel trapped inside my life," she sings on the spare, acoustic "begged." "Is that a normal thing." On a surprisingly muted duet with The Cure's Robert Smith, the two sing about being unable to sleep or eat, paralyzed by the weight of a crumbling relationship. "I think you're what's wrong with me," Rodrigo sings. Originally, Rodrigo told the BBC, it was a song about "missing someone so intensely she felt listless and depressed," and changed later to better reflect the dismal affect the relationship had on her. That there's another version somewhere of that collaboration, one that might have honored Smith's talent for writing about that intensity, the kind of love that makes you feel "all alone above a raging sea," is a shame.
With Guts, Rodrigo emerged as an artist clearly trying to carve out a path in pop music that was slightly askew from what her mainstream peers were doing. There was a very slight edge to her stardom that only intensified when stacked up to the comedic kitsch of peers like Sabrina Carpenter or the tediously virtuous, theatrical storytelling of Taylor Swift. Rodrigo namechecked riot grrrl as an inspiration on her music and littered her lyrics with enough casual "f***"s to erase her chaste Disney history for good. Her music teemed with a still nascent understanding of conflict and vengeance, not just to bad boys but to the cultural expectations that weighed upon all her decisions. "I'm sexy and I'm kind, I'm pretty when I cry," she sang on that album's opener, which rang like a sarcastic parody of all that she's supposed to embody as a young pop star. But if Rodrigo was on track to keep moving left of center in a pop industry that rewards anonymity, you seem pretty sad pushes her songwriting closer to mainstream ideals, sidelining that rebellious spirit of critique to embrace a cohesive narrative of a relationship.
Across her body of work, Rodrigo has also cultivated a talent for tracing the entire lifecycle of a relationship in a single song: the promises of early love, its complicated reality, the demise. But it's often what comes after much later, the fiery realizations, complaints and self discoveries that bubble to the surface of her brain and into her songwriting, that has made her voice distinctive and even unconsciously instructive to her young listenership: that a teenage promise of "forever" won't last, that an older man might "sell you for parts." On you seem pretty sad, she attempts the form at album's length, taking her time to linger in the rush of love before recounting its failure. But while there are regrets, Rodrigo doesn't step back quite far enough to truly make sense of what this relationship has done to her, and bring any epiphanies, as she has so many times before, to the music.
But there is one exception: "the cure," undeniably the album's best track and one of the strongest of Rodrigo's career so far. Over strummed acoustic guitar and a strings section that calls to mind the romantic rock of Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight," Rodrigo sings of being infected, by intrusive thoughts and relationship jealousy — so-called "toxins in her bloodstream" — and the hope that her partner is the antidote. "It doesn't matter how your love feels anymore, it'll never be the cure," she sings. But it's not an angsty revenge song aimed at an old flame, though it swells with the despair of those tracks in her catalog, begging to be belted by a group of girls in a karaoke room.
Instead, Rodrigo's anger is directed at the realization that the love she's finally found, even in all of its euphoric, life-altering, insanity-inducing complexity, can't fix her. As an artist who has spent so much time detailing the experience of pining for true love, that epiphany is crushing. But Rodrigo pushes through it, processing her experience for the sake of the work, of getting to the root of how it's transformed her. It's not quite a self-crucifixion, but it's the only moment on you seem pretty sad that we hear Rodrigo truly exposed.
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