Olivia Rodrigo is done with rock’n’roll
Exasperated power ballads and pop-punk reread through the prism of Generation Z: this has been Olivia Rodrigo’s career so far. The formula was among the most successful of the pop rock of these years: 36 million copies sold with his first two albums, “Sour” and “Guts”, 3 Grammy Awards losers, successes everywhere. Now, however, something changes. The former Disney starlet’s third album, “You seem pretty sad for a girl so in love”, will be released on June 12th. Olivia Rodrigo enters that phase that once, before the liquid music or post-discography, was referred to as “the album phase of maturity”. And in doing this he becomes the protagonist of a clear turning point: he closes with rock’n’roll. «I love rock music and have a deep reverence for it, it’s practically the only genre I listen to. But I think that, at the beginning (of the album’s genesis, ed.), I wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea of rock in the traditional sense, with power chord And distortion».
“A song can be alternative without being ‘I love rock’n’roll'”
The genre and the sound are linked to the imagery told in the thirteen songs that make up the album, born from the end of what the 23-year-old Californian star defines as her “first great relationship”. In “You seem pretty sad for a girl so in love” Olivia retraces all the stages of the story: the meeting (“Drop dead”), the abandonment to falling in love (“Stupid song”, “u+me = <3”), the crisis (“Begged”), the acceptance of the end (“Cigarette smoke”). And he does it by giving up the impulsive writing of the first two albums. Rodrigo indicates very different references compared to the past: “Simple passion” by the French Nobel Prize-winning writer Annie Ernaux, “Sex and the city”. The central idea is thelove as a mental disorder: “I was very inspired by all the ways love can drive you crazy and make you miserable.” The sound direction is more ambiguous than in the past: less explosionmore check And emotional stratification. If you think about it, an expression like “Olivia Rodrigo is done with rock’n’roll” may perhaps be too clear-cut, but it still conveys the idea of a turning point. In reality the definition is more nuanced: «A song can be alternative without being like “I love rock ‘n’ roll” by Joan Jett. I was interested in something more subtle, more implicit, less explosive,” she told the New York Times.
The definitions are actually more nuanced
And in fact among the sound references he mentions the symbolic bands of the new wavestarting with the Cure: «There was something in the sobriety of new wave which I liked. I was really obsessed with that kind of music when I was making the album.” One of the singles that preceded the album is entitled “The cure”. But beyond this there is more: during his recent performance at Primavera Sound of Barcelona, Olivia Rodrigo called Robert Smith on stage and presented for the first time live the song that the two recorded together for “You seem pretty sad for a girl so in love”, “What’s wrong with me”. The two had played together already in Glastonbury: «I’m a Cure fan, but since I met him and got to spend time with him, I started listening to all those new wave bands again. I was living in England at the time, so obviously I got a lot of inspiration from English bands. For me, in songwriting, feeling always comes first. And so I knew I wanted to write songs about what it feels like to be in love. And love for me is just like that: that vibration, that emotional quality.”
Records already broken
It was already clear that the anticipation around Olivia Rodrigo’s return was very high when in April the album’s lead single, “Drop dead”, flew straight to first place on the Billboard Hot 100, allowing Olivia Rodrigo to conquer a record: the singer-songwriter officially became the first artist to debut at first place in the US charts with the lead single from each of her first three albums in the historic US chart, Billboard Hot 100. Rodrigo will be in Italy with his “The unraveled tour” on 27 and 28 April 2027 at the Unipol Dome in Milan. The tour is already on sold out worldwide and has sold over 1 million tickets. Several attendance records have already been broken. The tour was initially announced with four dates in Brooklyn, but quickly expanded into a massive one residence of 10 shows at Barclays Center. Rodrigo also set the attendance record atIntuit Dome of Los Angeles, bringing the total to 10 historic dates and setting a new benchmark for the structure. AtO2 in Londonwith 11 nights scheduled, Olivia Rodrigo will join an elite group of artists who have achieved such numbers, including Princethe Spice GirlsThe One Direction, Ariana Grande, Elton John And Rihanna.
