Olivia Rodrigo: Sour

My very smart friend Aamina phrased Sour like this: “There are two categories of songs on the album, ones that are masterpieces on their own and ones that make me excited to see her future.” Of course, even Sour’s weakest songs are more infectious, more clear-eyed, than most pop music coming out right now. But she’s at her best as a songwriter when observing heartache, when reckoning with blame and personal perception. That doesn’t mean she needs to “pigeonhole” herself as a heartbreak kid, but she has a unique gift for self-aware yet ruthless situational analysis that thrives when it’s set free. “Traitor” is close to flawless, with its Kacey Musgraves-esque light-folk backdrop and wry, clenched-jaw phrasing. The pop-punk “good 4 u” is a perfect song for screaming at karaoke. (“Like a damn sociopath!”) There’s a wounded bitterness in many of these songs, and it’s stinging and cathartic to listen to an artist pick the scab and refuse the bandaid.



And then there are the songs that show the potential. The tracklist makes it seem like we’re about to get a five stages of grief situation, but that’s not really what it is by the end. (In that sense, “happier” might have been a more fitting place to land.) “Hope you’re ok” is pretty, but the title isn’t for the person who broke her heart — instead, she pulls in somewhat jarring outside voices, musing about lost childhood friends who experienced abuse and neglect at the hands of their parents. That kind of thing worked on a song like Taylor Swift’s “seven,” but it feels a little disjointed here, despite the lovely intimacy of the melody.

Similarly, a song like “jealousy, jealousy” is a spot-on reflection of Instagram culture, but it’s almost banal in the way it rails against general comparisons (whereas “deja vu” takes a similar thread and flays it open to get to the root of the fear: “I hate to think that I was just your type.”) While Olivia co-wrote all of Sour, “jealousy, jealousy” notably has primary writing credits from Casey Smith (Jonas Brothers, Ashe) as well as chief collaborator Dan Nigro, which could account for some of the subject matter shift; the songs Olivia has solo credits on, “happier” and “enough for you,” are some of the album’s strongest.

For all the comparisons that have been made and will continue to be made to her chief predecessors Taylor and Lorde, Olivia is already proving herself to be on a stylistically different track. She doesn’t traffic in broken fairytales like the former or vivid suburban metaphor like the latter — musically and lyrically, she’s drawn to frankness, laying down the cards all at once. Her voice is effortless, the clear result of years of vocal training plus natural talent that makes her soar where many singers have to strive. Thinking back to those musicians’ debut albums, both of which are genius in their own right, there’s a pattern of wisdom, an old soul type of teenage transcendence. They positioned themselves as outsider bards, taking covert notes in diaries as they eyed their classmates and the world around them. “But I know it’s not forever,” Lorde slices through a tennis court fantasy. “Take me back when our world was one block wide,” Taylor reminisces on a perspective that was once so small, the implication being that she’s all grown up now. Olivia’s perspective, by contrast, feels more present, more minute-to-minute. The immediacy of the gut punches plucks something from you as you listen, some kind of urge to suck in your stomach and wail. “God, it’s brutal out here,” with its ties to both Olivia’s own brutal lyricism, is a line so perfect and well-delivered it’s almost difficult to listen to. (To be clear, that has not stopped me.)

All that is to say that Olivia Rodrigo has made her biggest influences so known (and so embedded, like with the “New Years Day” interpolation on “1 step forward, 3 steps back”) it’s impossible not to acknowledge them. But we’re quickly approaching the point at which that framework isn’t useful in talking about the music (though it remains to be seen which will prove more prescient a descriptor of Olivia’s assured superstardom). She’s not a fantasist, despite the intense emotion — even when wanting an ex-boyfriend back, she asks simply for the agency to drive on her own to his house. Pop music can encompass so much, and Olivia is carving out space for herself with a raised eyebrow and a very sharp knife.