Olivia Rodrigo Archives

Pushing past the tumult of her teenage rise to fame, Olivia Rodrigo embraces her ‘big girl’ era on her new record, an exuberant account of the promise and pitfalls of falling in love.

Olivia Rodrigo is growing up. While she’s still the same young woman with big feelings and a penchant for babydoll dresses, the 23–year–old appears much more self–assured than the anxious adolescent of Sour and Guts when we meet to discuss her new album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love. (Ironically, she seems happier too.) She’s speaking to me from her native Los Angeles, her cherubic face beaming as she tells me about her morning: mainly interviews and signing vinyls ahead of the much–anticipated release. The record is about her first “adult relationship” – likely her romance with English actor Louis Partridge, rumoured to have ended in late 2025. She tells me she finished making the record in March. “I’m still so close to it,” she says, adding that she’s ready to put it out into the world now. “I’m excited for it to not be ‘mine’ any more.”

Rodrigo kicked off this new era in April with the release of drop dead – not a vengeful “fuck you” to an ex–lover à la good 4 u or vampire, but an effervescent, synthy love song about the giddiness of sensing you’re on the precipice of a great relationship. “I wanted to capture that feeling of meeting someone you really like for the first time, and all of the excitement and nerves and anxiety that comes along with that,” she explains. Days after its release, she made a surprise appearance at Coachella, gambolling on stage in a pink leather bra and low–rise jeans to join pop ingenue Addison Rae for the song’s first live performance (after a quick duet of Headphones On). The crowd – often derided for being disengaged – went wild.

Fans and critics alike have been champing at the bit to hear OR3 – and little wonder, given Rodrigo’s extraordinary trajectory. Her ascent was lightning–fast, catalysed by her debut single “drivers license”, a stirring ballad about the intensity of first heartbreak. Diaristic yet deeply resonant – a potent blend which has come to characterise her work – the track smashed the record for the most single–day streams for a (non–Christmas) song on Spotify, vaulting a 17–year–old Rodrigo straight to the apex of the music industry in early 2021. “It was a crazy, crazy time,” she reflects.

Her debut, Sour, was the most–streamed album of 2021, going on to become Spotify’s most–streamed album by a female artist ever – a position it holds to this day – leapfrogging industry behemoths like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. Her sophomore album Guts was no slump, either. Its namesake world tour, attended by 1.6 million people and grossing over $200m across 101 shows, remains the most successful tour of any artist born in the 21st century. Last summer, she headlined Glastonbury just three years after her first appearance at the festival, The Cure’s Robert Smith in tow as her surprise guest. So colossal is the scale of her achievements that her three Grammy awards, four MTV Video Music Awards and seven Billboard music awards feel like footnotes in comparison.

Guts closed with a howling refrain that epitomised her fear of growing up and out of being a wunderkind – “They all say that it gets better, but what if I don’t?” – and, as she stands poised to embark on a new chapter, it seems like a good time to ask if she still feels the same way. “Oh my God, things have got so much better,” she says, laughing. “But I remember the fear that they wouldn’t. I was really young when Sour came out, and I was labelled this ‘precocious kid’, and I felt if I lost that I wouldn’t be as impressive anymore. But I actually feel like I’m getting better at making music as I get older. I’m inspired by more complex things and have more references to draw on. So I think that fear has been quelled.” Then, an endearingly self–effacing caveat: “I’m still quite young, though. I don’t have it all figured out.”