Still, such self-imposed comparisons to her messier forebears draw attention to a relative sheen that continues to halo Rodrigo, a former child actress who got her start starring in an “American Girl” movie and two high-profile Disney series. Even when playing distorted electric guitar chords in a punk-rock frock, there remains about her a telegenic poise.
Just the same, Rodrigo’s excellent first two albums — the spirited 2021 debut “Sour” and the more mature but still effervescent 2023 follow-up “Guts,” two of the sharpest and most consistent pop LPs of the decade so far — injected some smart, spiky energy into the Gen-Z musical mainstream. While “You Seem Pretty Sad” has moments that match the heights of her most inspired work, on the whole it is the first album she has released that feels less than revelatory.
Rodrigo first launched into the stratosphere with “Driver’s License,” a shattering, piano-driven confessional written with and produced by the Long Island emo veteran Dan Nigro, with whom she has continued to work ever since. Seamlessly melding universal feelings with the specifics of Rodrigo’s own life, “Driver’s License” possessed the power to lift teenage experience up to an exalted state and to make anyone older than that remember, quite viscerally, what it was like to be young and heartbroken.
That early success, though, might explain why Rodrigo’s subsequent albums have become increasingly bogged down by inert piano ballads — a minor flaw of “Guts” that becomes more noticeable on this solemn third album, which chronicles a romantic relationship in its entirety, from the tingle of infatuation through the slow accumulation of doubt and an eventual breakup.
The strict adherence to that chronology sometimes stilts the album’s momentum. “Drop Dead” is an exuberant opener, but there is an immediate drop-off in energy during the next two tracks, the anxiously impassioned “Stupid Song” — which begins with forlorn piano chords and takes too long to build toward a more thrilling, Lorde-like second half — and the dreamy, atmospheric love song “Honeybee,” one of two tracks on which Rodrigo is the sole writer, which she delivers with a delicate fragility. (The songwriter Amy Allen, best known for her work with Rodrigo’s ex-rival Sabrina Carpenter, has a co-writing credit on five of the 13 tracks.) “It’s too hard to describe this in a way that feels honest,” Rodrigo sings, echoing the sentiment of the previous song, on which she had just gushed, “I want you more than any stupid song could ever say.”
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