Olivia Rodrigo said on Thursday that her new single “The Cure” has nothing to do with the band The Cure, even as fans spent the week parsing every clue around the song’s title. The pop star is set to release the track on Friday as the second single from her forthcoming album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.
Rodrigo called “The Cure” her favorite song on the album and one of her favorite songs she has ever made, giving the release an unusually personal weight before listeners have even heard the full track. She posted the single artwork on Instagram on Tuesday, showing herself holding red string in a cat’s cradle-like shape that spelled out the song’s title, then followed it on Wednesday with a snippet of the music video that showed women in nurse uniforms and chunky white heels walking toward powdery pink doors marked “OR.”
The timing matters because Rodrigo has already turned the album rollout into a puzzle box. Last month, she confirmed in an interview with Cosmopolitan that the string is important to the album’s themes, and that detail quickly fed speculation around the single. The red thread also echoes the Red String Theory, or Red Thread of Fate, a belief drawn from East Asian mythology about invisible ties between people.
That left room for fans to wonder whether the song title was pointing to Robert Smith and the band The Cure, especially given Rodrigo’s public admiration for the group. She has previously described Smith as “perhaps the best songwriter to come out of England” and “a personal hero” of hers, and last June she brought him out as a surprise guest during her headlining Glastonbury set, where they performed “Friday I’m in Love” and “Just Like Heaven” together.
Smith himself has spoken warmly about the connection. In Rodrigo’s April cover story for British Vogue, he said she calls him often to talk about clothes and fashion and that they had spent “a couple of memorable nights in the studio together.” He added, “I can’t wait to hear what she does next!”
Rodrigo, though, drew the line on Thursday during an appearance on iHeartRadio’s Elvis Duran Show. The title of “The Cure” is not a nod to Smith’s band, she said, calling it “just a happy coincidence, I suppose.” That does not erase the trail of clues she has left for fans, but it does settle the question that has hovered over the rollout all week: the new single is not a tribute to The Cure, even if the coincidence has made it one of the most closely watched songs in her release calendar.
