“With her first two albums, Olivia Rodrigo proved herself perhaps the most gifted of the many chroniclers of Gen Z romance to emerge in Taylor Swift’s wake,” said Mikael Wood in the Los Angeles Times. But her best work to date, starting with the 2021 smash single “Drivers License,” conveyed “the hot sting of betrayal.” On her “thrilling” third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the 23-year-old former Disney teen star opens with “a number of first-flush-of-love songs as potent as any breakup tune,” then brings new wisdom to the heartbreak that so often follows. To accommodate the wider range of emotions, this record “pulls in chiming folk-rock and synthed-up new wave” and even throws in “a gorgeous wine-bar piano ballad that might put the scare in Rodrigo’s pal Laufey.”
The result is Rodrigo’s “most complete, musically adventurous album yet,” said Julyssa Lopez in Rolling Stone. Beginning with “Drop Dead,” a recent No. 1 single, the initial run of songs captures the dopamine rush of love’s onset. But from about the halfway point on, “the seams come apart a little more with each track.” As the record progresses, she “dives into her insecurities with a mix of humor and honesty” until, in the end, “she comes to the brutal realization that you can adore someone more than anything and still have to let them go.”
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