Olivia Rodrigo’s girlishness is her superpower.
She recently turned 23, but it feels as if even 30 years from now, Rodrigo will still be all smiles and waves in baby-doll dresses.
But, as fans already know, that perky veneer is often a shroud over her aching vulnerability, which is spotlighted with intensity on her melodically mature third album, out now.
These 13 songs swing from the giddy rush produced by the boy with “floppy hair” who takes her out to dinner (“U + Me = <3”) to crushing uncertainty (“Begged”) to, yes, sadness on “What’s Wrong With Me,” featuring Robert Smith of The Cure. Which is not to be confused with Rodrigo’s song, “The Cure.” Or her name-checking the band’s “Just Like Heaven” in “Drop Dead,” the galloping first single from the album.
Romance, it seems, makes Rodrigo sad, especially when longing for her partner on “Maggots for Brains” (“I’m a sad shell of a woman … but that’s the thing that happens when my baby goes away”).
But she also basks in flirtation, as heard on the pop-alicious “Drop Dead” with that Swiftian descriptor of her beau “looking like an angel on the walls of Versailles” among the best of her still-burgeoning career.
