Olivia Rodrigo Is at Her Most Stirring With New Single, ‘The Cure’

All right — now you’re ready for Olivia Rodrigo‘s third album.

Not that the first single from the LP, “Drop Dead,” didn’t properly prime her audience for what’s coming. It wouldn’t have debuted at No. 1 if it didn’t do a sufficient job of creating expectancy; several other equally big pop ladies have recently flopped with equally high-profile comeback songs, proving that Rodrigo didn’t return on top strictly on the basis of name value. But “Drop Dead” felt like a deliberate outlier song, testing the waters to see whether her audience would accept Rodrigo in a chipper mood. They did, but that didn’t mean the fans didn’t still want Rodrigo to go sour on them again.

So the album’s second single, “The Cure,” is a heck of a wish-granter. It’s the kind of preview track that lets you know that chances will be taken but you’ll still get sufficient quantities of what you came to the party for, which, in this case, is something reasonably wrenching. Among the licenses Rodrigo has collected since her debut five years ago is a permit to get completely dramatic on us, and she and her collaborator Dan Nigro go down that road here, deliciously, with a stirring ong that manages to make new tricks feel like their best old ones.

The tense musical contrast with the 100% lighter-hearted “Drop Dead” is immediately evident. The lickety-split acoustic strumming that starts off the track kind of establishes it as possibly in the fast, somber style of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Adore” or Foo Fighters’ “Everlong,” and it does kind of fulfill that promise of intensity, eventually… but it takes its sweet time getting there. She’s about three and a half minutes into a five-minute track before it starts building up a real head of steam. Thankfully, the build-up is so strong that if that’s all there was to the tune, it’d still be a worthy album track. That it actually goes somewhere, and sticks what we used to call a landing, feels especially rewarding in a current era of TikTok-oriented quickies that just kind of peter out after a couple of promising mini-choruses.

Five-minute pop songs: they’re the new two-minute pop songs. You heard it here, or from Olivia Rodrigo, first!

Plus, who doesn’t love a Candy Striper in turmoil?

That’s in reference to the quite good music video directed by Cat Solen and Jamie Gerin, starring Rodrigo as an old-school nurse who is running some experiments on the side before she starts to undergo her own body-horror issues. (The organs she’s sticking a needle into, which go from red-blooded to grey-and-white, look like strangely phallic hearts.) Eventually she starts to bleed red yarn, or something like that. All symbolism aside, Rodrigo herself is an arresting subject for the cameras, whether she’s running through pink and pastel hospital corridors or — in some late cutaways— caught actually banging away on a guitar.

Then the climax subsides for a lovely coda of strings, accompanied by a denouement in which the now casually clad, contemporary-looking singer smashes up her play set in the apartment where she’s presumably been brooding over all this stuff. Drama? What drama?

Several things are cool about the balance “The Cure” strikes as a forward step in her catalog. For starters, there’s the way that it threatens to become a rock ‘n’ roll song — and certainly has the feel of some of the tenser rock numbers from her first two albums — but never becomes too reliant on electric guitars to get where it’s going.

But the emotional balance is what’s most interesting. She’s matured past the revenge-pop-punk of “Guts” and “Sour,” apparently, or at least had a relationship to inspire her that didn’t call for the same kind of you-did-me-wrong songwriting. She’s exploring a relationship that wasn’t built purely on passion and toxicity, and figuring out why something that actually seemed to be “good 4 her” still wasn’t any kind of truly healing elixir.

From all indications, the album that’s coming out in a few weeks, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl in Love,” will follow the arc of a relationship that started with the bliss of “Drop Dead” and ended — or at least got complicated — with the disappointment of “The Cure.” If that is at all an accurate takeaway from these two tracks, and from what little she’s really said about the album, the album could mark a leap in maturity that would be appropriate for a singer-songwriter who’s now a wisened 23.

Regardless of what the rest of the album holds, though, “The Cure” is all the indication anybody needs that Rodrigo was not just a 23-song wonder. (Or, fine, a 28-song prodigy, if you want to count the last album’s bonus tracks.) And the wisdom of the record company’s or her strategy in releasing singles is becoming evident: First, give fans the new song that informs fans in a big way she’s out not to repeat herself. The,n give them a tune that shows she is intending to revisit some of the things you loved about her… like her ability to craftily go to some dark places and inhabit the soul of a rocker while she’s doing it. May the rest of OR3 pay off nearly as well.