Critics Are Calling It Her Best Work: Olivia Rodrigo's Third Album Lands

Olivia Rodrigo's third album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love dropped at midnight Friday, and critics who spent the past 24 hours listening to its 13 tracks arrived at something close to a consensus: this is the best thing she's made. 1

The AP's Maria Sherman called it "a giant step forward for the songwriter who emerged a promising young talent before she could even parallel park." 1 The LA Times called it "thrilling." 2 Pitchfork gave it an 8.3 — the highest score of her career — and described Rodrigo as "always in control" as a songwriter, even when her characters are falling apart. 3 Variety said she "trades pop-punk for new wave — and angst for true love — for half an album" in what they called an "excellent" record. 4

The album is structured as a love story told from start to finish. Side A — "Girl So in Love" — covers the obsessive high: the sleeplessness, the skipped meals, the feeling that a stranger in a bar line could look like an angel on the walls of Versailles. Side B — "You Seem Pretty Sad" — tracks the collapse. 3

What makes this structurally different from Sour and Guts is the genre pivot. Rodrigo and her producer Dan Nigro have dialed the time machine from '90s riot grrrl all the way back to 1982. The palette is explicitly '80s: Peter Hook-style basslines, Gary Numan synths, jangle pop, New Romantic-era rock, and The Cure's particular brand of gorgeous gloom. The LA Times observed that "U + Me = <3" sounds like "Sixpence None the Richer reborn as a Midwestern emo band," and noted the album closes its pop-punk chapter for something more "expansive." 2

Pitchfork's Molly Mary O'Brien flagged "Purple" as the album's hinge — a Jim-E Stack co-production where the drumbeat "toes the line between the racing heart of a good crush and the racing heart of a panic attack," ending with Rodrigo whispering: "Melt with you till it all turns black / Melt with you till I just feel sad." 3

NPR's Hazel Cills pointed to "The Cure" — the second single — as the album's single best track, noting that it "swells with the despair" of Rodrigo's earlier breakup catalog but turns the anger inward: "It doesn't matter how your love feels anymore, it'll never be the cure." 5 The AP review described the production across the record as "more complicated, nuanced and vibrant" than anything Rodrigo has made, with string arrangements and gothic guitar tones sitting comfortably alongside emo chords. 1

The album's longest-building subplot is its collaboration with The Cure's Robert Smith — and the payoff is on Track 10, "What's Wrong With Me." 3

The groundwork was laid over years: Rodrigo name-checked "Just Like Heaven" in the album's opening track, titled another song "The Cure," and then debuted "What's Wrong With Me" with Smith at Primavera Sound Barcelona on June 6 — which this channel covered when it went viral. The studio version is the first collaboration in her career. Over murky synths, the two trade lines about not sleeping, not eating, being frozen by the wreckage of a relationship. When they sing "I can't eat / I can't sleep" together, Pitchfork noted their accents diverge mid-phrase — Rodrigo's can't, Smith's cahn't — a tiny, charming detail that lands harder than a chorus. 3

Rodrigo originally wrote the song about "missing someone so intensely she felt listless and depressed," she told the BBC, before reworking it when the relationship ended to reflect its actual toll. 5

Most critics were unanimous about the front half and the standout tracks. The divide — when there was one — was on the back half's emotional resolution.

NPR's review said the album's second side "doesn't step back quite far enough to truly make sense of what this relationship has done to her." 5 NPR also noted the album's melodramatic A-side "gets repetitive" in places — that Guts's sharper satirical edge has been traded for something more earnest.

The NYT framed it differently: the record is "polished" and "solemn" but "misses her signature adrenaline rush." 6 But the Pitchfork and AP positions — that this is Rodrigo's most ambitious, most realized record to date — dominated first-day reaction online.

The AP framed the arc of her three albums directly: a first album you have your whole life to write, a second that builds, and a third that's "a moment of catharsis." "Rodrigo seems to be a shining example. She seems pretty self-actualized, for a girl so open to falling hard." 1

The first two singles — "Drop Dead" (Hot 100 #1) and "The Cure" (debuted at #1 on iTunes US) — had already racked up more than 300 million pre-release streams combined. 7 Fan accounts and TikTok reaction videos started going up within minutes of the midnight drop. One TikTok creator's immediate listen had racked up views by morning with the caption "IM NOT OK." 8

The album was released on a Friday in June with close to 200 record stores holding midnight countdown parties across the US. 9 LA pop-ups run through June 14.

Rodrigo's Unraveled Tour — a 65-date run including four LA nights at Intuit Dome — is already on sale, kicking off later this year. If the reviews are right that you seem pretty sad has pushed her songwriting somewhere new, this tour will be the first chance to hear what that sounds like in an arena.