No matter what you think of Olivia Rodrigo — what ever you could say (or tweet) about the 18-year-outdated singer-songwriter shaping up to be pop’s breakout star of 2021 — rely on that Rodrigo has by now believed it.
She is aware of she’s “obsessive,” as she places it in a single song from her wily and influencing debut album, “Sour” she is aware of she’s “too emotional,” as she places it in yet another. And while she also appreciates she “thinks too significantly ’bout kids who really do not know me,” she simply simply cannot enable it: “I hate the way I’m perceived,” Rodrigo admits in a voice proudly described by SoCal vocal fry — a rather placing confession provided that it arrives hardly a moment into an LP whose complete position is to introduce her.
Hot on the heels of “Drivers License,” Rodrigo’s gloriously melodramatic ability ballad that came out of nowhere to expend 8 months atop Billboard’s Sizzling 100, “Sour” might be the most self-knowledgeable pop file in the latest memory. All over again and all over again across these 11 tracks, Rodrigo steps her values and wants in opposition to these of other folks she describes how her encounter of a partnership differed from an ex’s and wonders why she’s not as psyched about staying younger as older persons hold telling her she should really be.
“I’m so sick of 17 / Where’s my f— teenage aspiration?” she snarls more than crunching guitars on “Brutal” — just one particular perfect Instagram caption on an album entire of them.
This preoccupation with notion and id helps make feeling for a member of Gen Z who grew up amid social media exactly where even non-famous people have to find out to navigate an endless projection of selves. About a creeping bass line in “Jealousy, Jealousy,” she admits to wanting to “throw my cellphone across the home ’cause all I see are girls also very good to be correct.”
However for Rodrigo, it is also an occupational hazard. Prior to “Drivers License” promptly ignited her musical job, the Temecula native with Filipino family roots was ideal regarded for her starring function on the deeply self-referential Disney+ demonstrate “High Faculty Musical: The Musical: The Collection,” on which she performs a woman who has a starring purpose in a generation of a superior school musical tailored from the unique 2006 Disney Channel film.
A lot more complex still, Rodrigo supposedly wrote “Drivers License” soon after breaking up with one of her castmates — an actor whose onscreen character experienced previously motivated true-existence Rodrigo to write a track for her character to sing (right after composing it!) on the show.
Does all this make it audio as though “Sour,” which she built pretty much entirely with author-producer Daniel Nigro, should appear with a flow chart? You really do not will need to know nearly anything about Rodrigo’s lifestyle — Alright, Rodrigo’s lives — to appreciate the history, which makes use of shapely melodies and crafty textures to provide tales about the emotional trials of late teenhood. Rodrigo talks about how she’s “obsessed with emotions” — “I’m the most sensitive bitch in the entire entire world,” she instructed Interview journal — and indeed the lovelorn desperation of a track like the pop-punk “Good 4 U,” about a man “who will hardly ever have to harm the way you know that I do,” is so vividly expressed that it feels practically euphoric.
Strip absent the intricate intertextual stuff Rodrigo acquired to do by seeing her avowed hero Taylor Swift, and “Sour” argues that even heartbreak is a welcome sensation just after a lot more than a yr of soul-deadening Zoom daily life.
“Maybe in some masochistic way, I type of find it all remarkable,” she says of a boy’s combined messages in “1 Stage Forward, 3 Steps Again,” which requires sufficient inspiration from Swift’s song “New Year’s Day” — from its descending chord progression and its perception in passionate destiny — that the superstar is credited as a co-author.
However fully appreciating Rodrigo’s skill requires shelling out near notice she sings like an actor and writes like a screenwriter, which sets her aside in a submit-Taylor pop scene which is gotten quickly crowded with the whispery likes of Billie Eilish, Tate McRae and Gracie Abrams. In “Deja Vu” she punctuates a verse about an ex who recycles her old jokes to make his new flame giggle with a bitter chuckle that says all the things about this dude in “Traitor” she rhymes “little white lies” with “brown guilty eyes” so that you can see him just as obviously.
Stylistically, the tunes move involving crisp retro-’90s guitar rock — “Brutal” is a comically audacious Elastica rip — and tender acoustic balladry long on piano and fingerpicked guitar. (Nigro is wonderful at utilizing surprising appears, like the frayed synth tone in “Deja Vu,” to embody Rodrigo’s point out of brain.)
The referents are hipper than with past Disney stars looking to split out of the Mouse Property, and the language is coarser with F-bombs dropping each couple tunes. There’s absolutely nothing offhand about these tracks, however every single has been worked to a sort of exquisitely scuffed polish that fits the album’s hall-of-mirrors vibe.
Rodrigo ends “Sour” by turning her gaze outward in the hymn-ish “Hope Ur Alright,” which tells of two childhood pals — a person of whom she describes in a writerly flourish as “a towhead blond with eyes of salt” — who struggled with bigoted, unloving parents when they were young. She’s not positive exactly where they ended up, she tells us, softly and breathily now, as though she’s seeking back by the eyes of an old woman.
But of system, she’s not. “Nothing’s eternally / Nothing’s as excellent as it would seem,” she sings — another illusion inside of and out.