Olivia Rodrigo’s new album references another artist repeatedly. It’s not Taylor Swift.

How do you review an artist like Olivia Rodrigo right now? She’s arguably the biggest twentysomething pop star today, ahead of even Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish. Intelligent, charming, even politically outspoken, Rodrigo writes or co-writes all her songs and has had eight top 10 hits in the past five years, including the two advance singles from her new album, and a whopping four No. 1s. Her 2021 debut Sour (“Drivers License,” “Good 4 U”) recently became the first album by any female artist, including Taylor Swift, to reach 17 billion streams on Spotify. The punky kiss-off anthems of her 2023 album Guts were embraced by critics as much as the public, and the former Disney teen TV star has also won three Grammys and about 100 other prizes.

Her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, was released Friday morning. Her Gen Z and alpha fans already know what they think no matter what I might say. I’m not even sure I would disagree with them that much, except that I think the album is too long at 51 minutes, compared to Sour’s roughly 35 and Guts’ 39—the title isn’t the only place YSPS4AGSIL abandons her previous admirable concision.

So I’m going to address a constituency whose views on the subject may be less preformed, who might even be a little perplexed. By which I mean fans of legendary postpunk/goth band the Cure, whose lead singer Robert Smith appears here as the first guest feature on any Rodrigo album. The 67-year-old duets with the 23-year-old on 10^th track “What’s Wrong With Me” and even contributes a part on his signature six-string bass. Last week, the two premiered the song live at the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona. “I just can’t believe that this song exists with the person that it exists with, and I’m just so fuckin’ over the moon,” Rodrigo said. This was not the first time they’d performed together. Last summer at Glastonbury, Smith took the stage to sing “Friday I’m in Love” and “Just Like Heaven” with Rodrigo during her set, helping make it one of the festival’s most talked-about events. She introduced the Gothfather as “perhaps the best songwriter to come out of England.”

It doesn’t stop there. Rodrigo also invokes the Cure on the album opener and lead single “Drop Dead,” singing to her prospective new love, “You know all the words to ‘Just Like Heaven,’ / And I know why he wrote them now that you’re standin’ right here.” Then, what was the second single called, which comes two songs before the Smith cameo on the album? That’s right, “The Cure.” Mind you, it uses cure in the conventional sense, as in the thing for what ails you, not mentioning the band at all. Still, please observe the multicolored strings thumbtacked to the wall behind me—the title was clearly no coincidence. Even when it’s unverbalized, sonic nods to the Cure and the new wave in general are (almost) all over the album.

Why? To start, it’s a family affair. Rodrigo said on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show this week that her father has seen the Cure about 30 times. When she introduced him to Smith, her dad was in tears, she said, and he now uses a shot of them together as “his screen saver on his phone.” (Meanwhile, she said, laughing, her metal-loving mom skipped her daughter’s set at Lollapalooza to go to the other stage and watch Korn.) But on another level, I think she’s turned to Smith as a muse, to help inspire her to take her songwriting to more complex zones beyond the conventional love or breakup song. As she told British Vogue in March, “I realized all my favorite romantic love songs were beautiful because they had a tinge of fear or yearning in them.”

For his part, Smith told Vogue that he’d been a fan since he first heard “Drivers License,” and he bought both her previous albums on CD. “Although most of the songs on those two albums are not really ‘aimed at my demographic’ (!), they are all so good that it is hard not to fall in love with them.” And to BBC6, he said, “I genuinely love what she does. I’m slightly in awe of how easy she finds it all.”

But Rodrigo isn’t the only young female American songwriter to call upon the Cure as a familiar. On the 2023 single “Not Strong Enough,” the indie supergroup Boygenius (Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker) described “drag-racing through the canyon / Singing ‘Boys Don’t Cry.’ ” Somewhat longer ago, Paramore’s “Caught in the Middle” opened with a lyrical echo of “In Between Days.” And Bridgers recorded her own cover of “Friday I’m in Love” as a Spotify Single back in 2018.

It makes sense that a cohort interrogating toxic masculinity and the givens of gender identity might reach back to Smith. “Boys Don’t Cry” blazed trails defying machismo, and “Just Like Heaven” set up its romance from the woman’s POV by narrating what “she said” well before the protagonist spoke for himself. And long before these artists were born, like many in the goth, New Romantic, and other subcultures of postpunk London, Smith was teasing his hair and wearing lipstick and eyeliner, as he still does, while remaining happily married to his high school girlfriend Mary Poole since 1988. Smith told Vogue that after they recorded together, Rodrigo continued to call him up “quite a bit to talk about clothes and fashion.”

But the lunar pull of Smith and the Cure on Rodrigo’s new album is in tension with an even longer-standing, much sunnier and blonder influence—which is, of course, Taylor Swift. Even though the two had an infamous falling-out years ago, “Taylor Swift” is the essential genre Rodrigo (like many other young pop women today) has been working in since the start of her recording career, from the personal-confessional-love-story mode of most of her songs to her fondness for shout-singing bridges.

The pop-punk, angry-sarcastic songs on Guts were so influenced by riot grrrl and other feminist rock foremothers (such as the Breeders, whom she toured with) that their angry and sardonic energy swept away much of the Swiftiness. But on this new album, Rodrigo’s story also includes the first rush of new love; the pangs of long-distance romance, growing doubts, and slow-imploding heartbreak; and the rueful aftermath—all subjects that tend to draw her back into the Swiftian stylistic universe.

At the album’s best, the Cure influence in many ways helps her and longtime producer and co-writer Dan Nigro (with occasional help from songwriter Amy Allen and others) keep intact Rodrigo’s edge, her darker viewpoint, and her weirder sense of humor. It’s as if there is a figurative, stylistic battle being waged here for Olivia Rodrigo’s artistic soul.

It sounds as if the initial version of the album might have leaned more to taffeta and sparkles, in fact, were it not for the relationship in question (with some British actor, another echo of Swift) breaking up somewhere during the writing and recording process. At which point, Rodrigo told the New York Times Popcast, “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.”

Advantage goths!

To judge which one stands victorious, let’s go through the 13 tracks—a very goth number, but also a very Taylor Swift number!—and ask where they fall on the Smith-vs.-Swift scale. I’ll rate each 1 out of 5 batwings (Cure, of course) and/or 5 cardigans (Swift).

1. “Drop Dead”

Starting strong for the Cure side with the direct reference, of course, even if there are some Swiftian “Aren’t we grown-up to be at a bar?” overtones here too. The “angel on the wall of Versailles” line is solid New Romantic stuff (and I don’t mean the 1989 song), while the unfortunate astrological-sign stuff about a “Pisces and a Gemini” leans Swiftward. But the mock-morbidity of “Kiss me and I might drop dead,” additionally calling to mind classic Cure album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, ultimately wins the song 3 BATWINGS and 1 CARDIGAN.

2. “Stupid Song”

The overwrought metaphors and melodrama and singspoken-then-shouted bridge are totally Swiftcore. The video that dropped Friday is even full of cats. (But wait, could they be lovecats?) Still, Swift would never pay all that off by mocking her own verbosity and even the very capacity of a song to capture real feelings, while Rodrigo sings, “I want you more than any stupid song could ever say.” 2 CARDIGANS, 1 BATWING.

3. “Honeybee”

Stylistically, this isn’t that much like either of our lodestars, but while I can’t begrudge Rodrigo her gooey love-drunk feelings here, I’m not much interested in them nor in the trite piano arpeggios and string swirls that accompany them. This is more in Rodrigo’s theater-kid wheelhouse; it could almost be a third-tier outtake from Wicked. The Cure would never. 1 CARDIGAN.

4. “Maggots for Brains”

Now this is more like it! From the opening beatbox-plus-drums rhythm track and twangy, reverb-heavy guitar riff, Cure lovers will be head-nodding at the least. And then we get to the ultragothy chorus: “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.” Then the titular maggots! But I especially love how she rounds that off with the kicker, “But that’s just a thing that happens when my / When my baby goes away.” An amusingly anticlimactic and self-consciously classic-pop punch line that’s less Robert Smith than Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields or, more relevant in this context, of the Gothic Archies. 4 BATWINGS.

5. “U + Me =

One of the album’s most appealing tracks but also a dilemma for our purposes, as it is kind of a perfect union of Swiftian and Smithic values. Both thematically and musically, it could almost be one of the more upbeat coupledom songs on Lover, Swift’s own album about crushing on a London boy, but it also has some very Cure-like guitar and bass tones, and maybe a little “Friday I’m in Love” in the chorus’s chord progression. The very funny fake-out of “I like your big … sister!” is a better dick joke than anything Swift got within screaming distance of on her most recent album’s embarrassing “Wood.” But also the wink at Swift’s “Cruel Summer” is masterful in the lines “They say modern love’s a cruel endeavor / And to that I say fuck it, whatever.” (As Kurt Cobain adds, “Never mind,” from beyond the grave.) Besting your bully at her own game is the dream of all the tender goth children, and also that line is rhymed with leather, so this gets another 3 BATWINGS, plus a consolation 1 CARDIGAN.

6. “My Way”

This self-declared “petty bitch” song about some girl who’s trying to poach her man is very mid-2010s Taylor-does-Avril, pouty and unworthy of Rodrigo’s general outside-the-lines thinking on this album. The oddball new-wave arrangement does not distract enough to prevent me from wincing at lines like “That’s it! I win!” 3 CARDIGANS.

7. “Purple”

The color–coding is one of several Swiftlike tropes in here, but it’s got some fine narrative details, and it’s in a spacious musical mode that doesn’t feel boilerplate. In a real goth song, the troubling line “We fought about who I’m hanging out with, like a real couple” would have deeper consequences. But the repeated “I’ll melt with you” lines are clearly a reference to the Modern English ’80s-night classic, which she’s told the BBC she wants as her wedding song, so big new-wave credit there. 2 BATWINGS, 2 CARDIGANS.

8. “The Cure”

Again, not about the band, but still. And the video (like Rodrigo’s website) does use one of the vintage Cure typefaces, from the cover of the aforementioned Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. It’s also probably the album’s most successful realization of the paradox articulated in the title, asking how someone can be in love and still unhappy. Maybe, she realizes, the mistake was in expecting a relationship to fix deeper problems in the first place. But also, when she sings the line “It’ll never be the cure,” she could mean that no matter how much he loves her, it’ll never be as good as a Cure song, couldn’t she? One of the album’s best, sounding mostly just like Rodrigo and no one else, but for the goth themes of poisons and apothecaries, 3 BATWINGS.

9. “Begged”

The one “Drivers License”–esque torch song on the album, although there’s going to be a little pileup of slow ones in the back end here. Still, Nigro’s fingerpicked acoustic guitar, as well as the unusual style of Rodrigo’s own stacked background vocals (which reminded me of the great cult sister trio the Roches), prevents it from feeling like a retread, and the relationship insight in this one is killer: “I’ll take what you’re giving / But nothing’s quite enough / When I know that to get it / I begged.” The beginning of the end. There’s a filigree of the melody of “Landslide” in the chorus (matched with a later lyrical reference to snow melting in the mountains), so for Stevie Nicks’ witchiness, if nothing else, 2 BATWINGS.

10. “What’s Wrong With Me”

The Smith duet, so the outcome is a given here. But also a turning point from where we were at with “The Cure,” when Rodrigo reconsiders and realizes that maybe the sick one isn’t her, but him after all. 5 BATWINGS.

11. “Less”

Instead of either of our emblems, this Tin Pan Alley–style jazz-piano ballad maybe should get a Billie Holiday–style white gardenia. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves—the influence here is more likely to be the young Icelandic jazz-pop singer Laufey. Still, there’s a mildly goth anti-love sentiment underlying the key line, the clever “If loving means letting go and wishing me the best … then I wish you loved me less.” More importantly, I choose to take the nicely thrown-away line “Let’s just go to bed or something” as a reference to the Cure’s own “Let’s Go to Bed,” so that’s an automatic 2 BATWINGS.

12. “Expectations”

I just know there’s a more exact reference for the ’80s-pastiche synth line here, but the file’s been deleted from my memory bank—it’s equal parts Gary Numan, New Order, maybe Visage. The song as a whole ventures into B-52s and Cyndi Lauper territory, plus “Material Girl”–style male backup vocals. It concerns mostly trust-fund guys with fake consultancy jobs at showbiz parties: “Don’t think my future husband’s at this bar in Silver Lake,” sings a sadder-but-wiser Rodrigo. The burst of fun the album needs at this point. 4 BATWINGS.

13. “Cigarette Smoke”

It’s an inevitability of the story’s wind-down that there are too many slow songs in the final third, but this one is fine too, and not especially Taylorlike—with its callbacks to multiple previous songs on the album, it’s actually more like a song from the denouement of a musical, down to the fade-out on the “memories go dark” refrain. But for that line—and because cigarettes are very goth—2 BATWINGS.

And so our totals are …

Cardigans: 10
Batwings: 31

I honestly wasn’t expecting such a blowout! But especially if you skip a few tracks (“Honeybee,” “My Way,” one or two of the late ballads as you see fit), I think we can declare YSPS4AGSIL a very goth-safe zone.

Children of the night, please prepare to spider dance!