Olivia Rodrigo’s New Album ‘You Seem Pretty Sad…’: Tracks Ranked

Rodrigo is starved for quality time with a long-distance partner on “Maggots for Brains,” a punky banger full of simple metaphors and icky imagery — the title included. This one feels more like Rodrigo just stepping up to the mic and ranting, letting her angst pour out of her and sounding better than ever as a pop-rock vocalist.

Debuted about a week ahead of its release at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, “What’s Wrong With Me” marks Rodrigo’s first proper collaboration on one of her albums and features one of her idols, the Cure’s Robert Smith. The pair’s voices work surprisingly well in gentle, billowing harmonies, produced with a lighter touch than most of the rest of the album.

Where “The Cure” is more intense and overwrought, “What’s Wrong With Me” touches on similar topics but is more resigned to their reality.

“Expectations” is a fun release that comes toward the end of the album following a long run of emotional heaviness, with Rodrigo trying out blooming, grated ’80s synths and flexing the speak-sing technique she perfected on Guts‘ “Bad Idea, Right?” in the second verse — hilariously punctuated by the line, “Don’t think my future husband’s at this bar in Silver Lake.”

Written about the gradual, sickening realization that a relationship is already over — but not quite yet having the heart to pull the trigger — “Less” is another of the simpler sounding tunes on You Seem Pretty Sad, carried by one of Rodrigo’s most heartbreaking hooks to date: “If loving me means letting go and wishing me the best/ Then I guess I wish, I wish, I wish you loved me less.”

Rodrigo has written about jealousy from an insecure point of view consistently throughout her discography, but “My Way” finally shows her approaching the topic from a fiery, self-possessed and even territorial perspective while scolding a girl who’s been making moves on her man. “So, where’d you get that confidence from?” she sings over an electric guitar mix that would make Avril Lavigne proud, finally realizing that she’s that girl. “Last time that I checked, I won.”

Despite there only being a recording of Rodrigo performing it live on Saturday Night Live to listen to, “Begged” went viral on TikTok weeks before its release. The lyrics are just that devastatingly relatable, with Rodrigo capturing the excruciating but pivotal moment in a relationship where one must decide to either give up on asking your partner for what you need or leave in pursuit of someone else who can actually give it to you.

And through the song’s hook, we can tell — perhaps even before the version of Rodrigo who wrote the song could — that she’s leaning toward the latter. She sings, her voice breaking, “But nothing’s quite enough when I know that to gеt it I begged.”

“Purple” is a hazy, hypnotizing song about the initially exciting process of two people blending their lives together. But what happens when they become too similar, and their life too monotonous? Rodrigo answers this question by comparing it to color mixing, singing at first, “And I melt with you, your red and my blue/ Now I see the world in purple.”

Then, at the end of the song, she turns it on its head: “Melt with you ’til it all turns black/ When you smooth it out, but it feels too flat.”

As both the lead single and the first song on the tracklist, “Drop Dead” is our first introduction into the relationship that plays out over the course of You Seem Pretty Sad. And knowing now how that relationship worked out for her in the end, Rodrigo could’ve easily chosen a more nuanced or cynical track — one that was more in line with what the rest of the album would entail — to kick things off. But that wouldn’t have been true to how that relationship actually felt in real life, and for listeners to understand just how devastating the ending ultimately was for her, we first needed to feel how euphoric it was in the beginning.

Plus, that chorus is chef’s kiss, catchily blending both modern phrases like internet stalking with the timelessness of the Palace of Versailles. Really, it’s no wonder that this became her fourth No. 1 on the Hot 100.

It’s hard to know what to make of “Honeybee” on your first few listens. The lyrics are sickly sweet and deeply romantic, but the song’s whispery, spectral sound is just offputting enough to make you feel like another shoe is about to drop at any point. After a while, though, you realize that this juxtaposition is probably the point, with Rodrigo — comparing her lover to a creature that’s delicate, difficult to trap and capable of stinging at any moment — illustrating that the intensity of a relationship is exactly what makes it so precarious.

In other words, the better something is, the more scared you are of it slipping away. “I hope I never see what your face looks like going,” she sings. “A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing.”

Rodrigo has said that of all the songs on You Seem Pretty Sad, “The Cure” is the one that most captures what the album’s all about. After hearing it in context, it’s clear that she was absolutely correct in her assessment. The way the song’s acoustic guitar, piano and strings build and mount in intensity before fully unraveling (to borrow a term that’s key to the lyrics) is exactly what the experience it describes feels like to go through.

Like a surprise horror-movie ending to a story you thought was a fairytale, Rodrigo’s sense of reality is shattered as she realizes that true love’s kiss actually can’t break her free from the spell of her inner demons.

“U + Me = <3” has one of the most addictive melodies in Rodrigo’s discography, catchy and fun and playful as she decides to go all in on the admittedly naive bet that she and her lover really are soulmates whose love will last forever. This is the only moment on the album where Rodrigo fully throws caution to the wind, having decided that the person she’s singing to is worth the risk — something that only makes it more painful later on when that relationship inevitably deteriorates, despite her initial confidence.

This song does not have the most clever or poetic lyrics on the album, but it does feel the most honest. Despite its title, “Cigarette Smoke” is both the deepest breath Rodrigo takes throughout the entire album as well as the most striking moment of clarity she has. Only now at the very end of the road is she able to realize that maybe the struggles she’d faced throughout her relationship weren’t simply unavoidable side effects of being in love, like she’d once concluded. Maybe she’d actually just deserved better from the start.

“I regret you and what I let slide,” she sings, her voice drifting and unfurling as gracefully as the song’s namesake. “I resent you for taking her side.”

“Stupid Song” is anything but what its title implies. In fact, the arrangement and pacing is masterfully done, its layers of harmony and piano reminiscent of the magic Rodrigo and Nigro captured with “Drivers License,” but even richer and with more depth.

The way the chorus pushes forward creates so much momentum while making you wait for each release, a clever, evocative way of musically portraying Rodrigo’s predicament of having so many big feelings for another person, but there only being so much opportunity and ability to express them to that person. “You’re a spark in the dark and my clothes all caught aflame/ You should feel how I feel when somebody says your name,” she sings, her voice effortlessly climbing higher and higher as the melody ascends like a roller coaster before the big drop. “I’m the car speeding down the boulevard without a brake/ And I want you more than any stupid song could ever say.”