‘you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love’ Album Review: Olivia Rodrigo Makes the Poison Sound Like the Cure [A-]
The cruelty hides inside a single verb. Olivia Rodrigo could’ve called her third album you ARE pretty sad for a girl so in love, but the word choice hands us a tidy confession. She picked seem instead, the word a friend deploys once she has caught you performing contentment and wants you to know the performance sprang a leak. The whole record worships that leak: the inch of daylight between how love photographs for the group chat and how it sits in the stomach at 3 a.m. For two albums, Rodrigo translated heartbreak into nausea and insomnia.
