Livies, the wait is over: Our girl has released her third studio album! Fans can now finally stream Olivia Rodrigo’s highly anticipated record, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So in Love — along with the music video for the album’s third single “Stupid Song”.
It’s been two months since Rodrigo launched the album’s coquettish rollout, which included cryptic lyrics on pink-painted walls, a dreamy, Versailles-set music video for her leading single, “Drop Dead,” a collab with Hubba Bubba and a 1950s-inspired hospital set crafted entirely from cardboard and felt for her follow-up release, “The Cure.”
The album was inspired by Rodrigo’s first adult relationship and the ways that experience impacted her sense of self.
“It’s me discovering what romantic love looks like in real time,” she told Dazed for its summer issue. “I’ve been in relationships before that were really exciting and tumultuous in a teenage way, but this was my first time being in a real, ‘big girl’ relationship. And when you’re in an intimate relationship, it holds up a mirror and shows you parts of yourself that you would never normally see. That was an endless source of inspiration — something that I’m still mining.”
Below, Yahoo has rounded up everything Rodrigo has said about the album ahead of its release. Consider this your unofficial guide to the pop star’s Girl So in Love era.
The album captures ‘romantic joy’
The front cover for You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So in Love features Rodrigo in a pale pink minidress, smiling blissfully as she swings in midair, while the back cover shows Rodrigo lying in a field of pink flowers, with a somber look on her face. “The back half [of the album] was me falling off the swing and kind of depressed,” she told BBC News.
“When I set out to make this album, I wanted to sort of capture romantic joy and pleasure and happiness for the first time because I feel like my last two albums obviously were very heartbroken and really angsty, and so I thought it would be a fun creative endeavor for me to try to do something a little different,” she told the outlet.
While there was speculation that the album was divided into love songs and sad songs, Rodrigo told Capital FM that isn’t exactly the case.
“I would describe it as chronicling a relationship,” she said. “I think unraveled is a really important word, it’s my tour, but it’s sort of like the beautiful parts of the relationship and also the unraveling of a relationship. It’s definitely a story in 13 parts.”
The album features post-punk influences
To put it simply, Rodrigo is a student of alternative rock. She has a history of bringing out influential artists like Alanis Morrisette or Talking Heads frontman David Byrne — and has never shied away from singing the praises of her favorite musicians. You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love also incorporates post-punk influences. Among the bands in her rotation while writing this album were the Cure, New Order, Depeche Mode and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
“Hopefully it translated,” Rodrigo recently told Dazed. “I wanted it to sound like how it feels to fall in love, string arrangements that are like your heart swelling or the ups and downs of having a crush on someone.”
Speaking of the Cure…
When Rodrigo announced the title of her second single off the album, “The Cure,” fans suspected that the Grammy winner had collaborated with Robert Smith, the frontman of the English band the Cure, on the track. It would make sense, considering the fact that Smith himself said he’d visited Rodrigo in the studio. But ahead of the song’s debut, Rodrigo debunked the rumors and confirmed that the track’s title was merely “a happy coincidence” and that Smith wasn’t involved. Not on this song, anyway…
Enter: “What’s Wrong With Me?” — Rodrigo’s first-ever feature and collaboration with Smith, which she debuted live at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival last weekend.
“She’s so good. I mean, she is genuinely fantastic as a songwriter, as a singer and as a performer,” Smith told BBC Radio 6 of performing with Rodrigo. “I genuinely love what she does.”
Smith added, “I’m slightly in awe of how easy she finds it all… It just comes across as very natural, very effortless.”
This isn’t the first time Rodrigo and Smith have taken a festival stage together. She famously brought him out during her headlining set at last year’s Glastonbury Festival, where she praised him as “a personal hero” of hers and “perhaps the best songwriter to come out of England.” Together, they performed “Friday I’m in Love” and “Just Like Heaven.”
Rodrigo’s favorite tracks
Rodrigo wasn’t shy when it came to sharing her favorite tracks off You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. Her picks? “Stupid Song,” which will actually serve as her third single off the album; “Honey Bee,” which she told BBC Radio 1 is a “plain and simple love song” and “Maggots for Brains.”
Also on that list is “The Cure,” which she previously described as her favorite song on the album and one of her favorite songs she’s ever written.
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