Olivia Rodrigo has made a new album out of the same nerves that powered SOUR and GUTS, only this time the machinery is aimed at happiness. The record is framed as love songs, but it keeps slipping back into the language of nausea, self-doubt and the kind of sadness that lingers after the crush should have turned sweet.
That is why the album is drawing attention now: it takes a familiar Rodrigo trick and pushes it into a different emotional room. On the first half, sickness hangs over nearly everything. In “drop dead,” she sings, “I feel like I might throw up/Left hook, right punch to the gut” and “You’re so so pretty boy/I’m paranoid I made you up.” In “stupid song,” she sounds split down the middle with, “I feel right, I feel wrong, I feel totally insane.”
The writing works because Rodrigo never treats the body as a neutral vessel. During SOUR and GUTS, she turned its worst sensations into hooks; here, she does the same thing for attraction. “maggots for brains” pushes the feeling further into decay with, “I’m a zombie in my body/I’m a train off of the track/I feel dirty, I feel rotten, and the colors are all flat.” The review’s point is not just that she is in love, but that she experiences love as a physical event that keeps curdling into alarm.
Even the softer songs keep that strain in the frame. “u + me = <3” reaches for romance through names carved into car-seat leather, promises of silver jewelry and “All my favorite Cadbury.” “purple” widens the picture with a mother showing baby pictures, a town with a local grocery store and a favorite florist, and objects that now come in twos. But the sweetness never settles. In the outro, she asks, “Are we so in love? Are we too attached?” and the leaving begins after that. What starts as swooning ends with the confession that it all “just feels sad.”
By the end, the album looks less like a clean celebration of love than a study in how quickly desire can tilt into dread. “my way” makes that resistance explicit, with Rodrigo pissed off and defending herself from an ex who is still posting pictures and sending poems. “Last time that I checked, I won,” she snaps in the bridge, a line that lands less like triumph than a refusal to be dragged back into someone else’s version of the story. The unanswered question is not whether she can write a love song. She already has. It is how long she can keep making the rush sound like a bruise before the feeling gives way completely.
