Cover The ups and downs of romance in Olivia Rodrigo’s third album, ‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love’ (Photos: Instagram/Olivia Rodrigo; edited by Angela Nicole Guiral)
The ups and downs of romance in Olivia Rodrigo’s third album, ‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love’ (Photos: Instagram/Olivia Rodrigo; edited by Angela Nicole Guiral)
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Yes. There is no skipping the beautiful ballad that is ‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love’. Here’s everything we liked about Olivia Rodrigo’s third album
There is something quite rigid with the times; the AI-fication of it all—your long messages, captions, emails and poetry. The antidote, I suppose, is immersing in something brutally honest, painfully embarrassing, yet undeniably human. In the case of Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, that means surrendering to its unflinching depiction of loving…and losing.
Romance, and the mess that inevitably comes with it, has always had a place in pop culture. Like many works that came before, Rodrigo’s third album succeeds in making shame and vulnerability a universal experience, rather than something we sheepishly hide within ourselves.
The 13 tracks, together and on their own, are entertaining confessions of humanity’s uncomfortable truths—what kind of heartache keeps us up at night, what makes us obsessively think in the daytime and what makes us whine and crash.
Despite the rather chaotic ups and downs that run through its entirety, Rodrigo’s work remains a palatable feast of emotions because, at one point or another, we’ve all spiralled in love, romantically or otherwise…however we choose to define it.
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You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love marks another milestone in Rodrigo’s creative partnership with producer and co-writer Dan Nigro. Now on their third album together, the duo delivers what may be their most sonically assured work to date.
The first half of the album unfolds the way many relationships do: sweet enough to make you grit your teeth, and deliriously thrilling to leave you mad. For Drop Dead, Rodrigo captures the all-consuming infatuation; the stage where you feel the “most alive” you’ve ever been. As unabashedly mushy as it is, the track serves a fitting introduction that gently buckles us in for the euphoric whirlwind that follows.
The singer continues her fawning with Stupid Song and Honeybee where she wallows in the overwhelming feeling of wanting to be close to your obsessions to the point of delirium.
Maggots for Brains, a personal favourite, stands out for its striking use of gore. Rodrigo’s words were so carefully chosen that it paints something morbid (“zombie in my body,” “I feel dirty, I feel rotten”) in contrast to the near-maddening romantic feelings that run through the rest of the album.
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Rodrigo teases the inescapable downfall of her romantic situation on Purple. Here, the songwriter questions how something as mystifying as love can become the very catalyst for losing oneself in the process. The hardest part of every downward turn is the admission of it, and eventually the act of letting go, which she then discusses in the record’s climax The Cure.
Positioned between the acoustic intimacy of Begged and the piano-driven heartbreak of Less, What’s Wrong With Me (with Robert Smith himself!) forces Rodrigo to confront one of the album’s most unsettling realisations: that her tendency to gravitate toward the wrong kinds of attachments may be the very thing undoing her.
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Rodrigo is hardly alone in slowly unpacking and traversing the emotional chaos of love in a concept album (think Lorde’s Melodrama and Lana del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell). What sets You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love apart, however, is the artist’s willingness to turn the lens inward. Rather than positioning herself solely as the wounded party, she embraces accountability by sharing consequences and confessing her own flaws and contradictions.
Love, as understood by the album or interpreted by the listener, is humanity’s chance against the ‘rigid times’. For as long as there is someone alive and willing to embrace its beauty and horror, love persists as an inexhaustible subject of the arts.
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Jove holds a degree in Journalism and is currently pursuing graduate studies in Philosophy at the University of the Philippines–Diliman. She has flair for in-depth, interview-driven stories that explore politics and culture, shaped by her background in national broadsheets.
When she’s not on assignment, Jove spends her days painting, sipping lemonade, and walking her dog, Jupiter. She can often be seen in Escolta with a film camera in hand, browsing novelty shops in search of rare memorabilia. For leads, reach her at Jove@tatlerphilippines.com.
