Few people on Earth can know how Olivia Rodrigo feels right now; even by today’s standards of viral fame, her rise has been exceptional. On January 7, she was playing in the celebrity minor leagues, the not-quite-18-year-old star of the Disney+ show High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. By January 12, she had smashed streaming records and blanketed TikTok with her debut single, “drivers license,” a piano-driven power ballad steeped in suburban malaise and teen anguish. Since then, she’s graced magazine covers, sung at the Brits, and become the subject of an SNL sketch. Then she was invited on as the musical guest.
But most of us can know how Olivia Rodrigo felt when she wrote her debut album, Sour: so gutted by heartbreak she simply couldn’t talk about anything else. “drivers license” outlined a crushing breakup, the contours of which became clearer in subsequent singles. A gossipy real-life backstory aided—though certainly did not precipitate—the song’s rise. (If you must know, it’s said to be about Joshua Bassett, Rodrigo’s HSM:TM:TS co-star, who has since been linked to another Disney star.)
The matter of failed romance is central to Sour, a nimble and lightly chaotic grab bag of breakup tunes, filled with both melancholy and mischief. Rodrigo’s first trick: Seconds into the lugubrious strings that open the record, she and her producer, Dan Nigro, abruptly switch to grunge guitar and distortion. Abandoning both the gossamer falsetto and the emotive belt that power “drivers license,” Rodrigo adopts a wry sprechstimme on “brutal” to rattle off her grievances: self-doubt, impossible expectations, her inability to parallel park. “Where’s my fucking teenage dream?” she snarls, wisecracking about the way pop culture romanticizes youth. It’s not particularly elegant—it’s not meant to be. Bucking expectations about the kind of sounds she might gravitate toward? That’s just part of the fun.
When she was little, Rodrigo and her mother made a habit of grabbing records indiscriminately from the thrift store, exposing her to the mistiness of Carole King and the muscle of Pat Benatar. Born two years post-Napster, two years pre-YouTube, Rodrigo grew up with music of all varieties at her fingertips. The range of her taste, and her disinterest in choosing a lane, animate Sour; queue up a track at random, and you might hear pop-punk fireworks à la Paramore (“good 4 u”), dewy-eyed soft balladry à la Ingrid Michaelson (“1 step forward, 3 steps back”), or alt-rock squall à la the Kills (“jealousy, jealousy”). Like any teenager, Rodrigo is trying on identities. The fluidity of her approach creates a sense of play that balances out the record’s more sullen moments—the self-righteous sprawl of “traitor,” for example, or the sinister extended metaphor of “favorite crime.”