Music
A Guide to Olivia Rodrigo’s New Album for Fans of 1980s Rock Band the Cure
On You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love , it’s a battle of Swift vs. … Smith?
June 12, 2026 4:43 PM
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Andre Dias Nobre/AFP via Getty Images, Theo Wargo/Getty Images for RRHOF, and Jo Hale/Getty Images for MTV.
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How do you review an artist like Olivia Rodrigo right now? She’s arguably the biggest twentysomething pop star today, ahead of even Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish. Intelligent, charming, even politically outspoken , Rodrigo writes or co-writes all her songs and has had eight top 10 hits in the past five years, including the two advance singles from her new album, and a whopping four No. 1s. Her 2021 debut Sour (“ Drivers License ,” “ Good 4 U ”) recently became the first album by any female artist, including Taylor Swift, to reach 17 billion streams on Spotify . The punky kiss-off anthems of her 2023 album Guts were embraced by critics as much as the public, and the former Disney teen TV star has also won three Grammys and about 100 other prizes .
Her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love , was released Friday morning. Her Gen Z and alpha fans already know what they think no matter what I might say. I’m not even sure I would disagree with them that much, except that I think the album is too long at 51 minutes, compared to Sour ’s roughly 35 and Guts ’ 39—the title isn’t the only place YSPS4AGSIL abandons her previous admirable concision.
So I’m going to address a constituency whose views on the subject may be less preformed, who might even be a little perplexed. By which I mean fans of legendary postpunk/goth band the Cure, whose lead singer Robert Smith appears here as the first guest feature on any Rodrigo album. The 67-year-old duets with the 23-year-old on 10 th track “What’s Wrong With Me” and even contributes a part on his signature six-string bass. Last week, the two premiered the song live at the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona. “I just can’t believe that this song exists with the person that it exists with, and I’m just so fuckin’ over the moon,” Rodrigo said. This was not the first time they’d performed together. Last summer at Glastonbury, Smith took the stage to sing “ Friday I’m in Love ” and “ Just Like Heaven ” with Rodrigo during her set, helping make it one of the festival’s most talked-about events. She introduced the Gothfather as “perhaps the best songwriter to come out of England.”
It doesn’t stop there. Rodrigo also invokes the Cure on the album opener and lead single “ Drop Dead ,” singing to her prospective new love, “You know all the words to ‘Just Like Heaven,’ / And I know why he wrote them now that you’re standin’ right here.” Then, what was the second single called, which comes two songs before the Smith cameo on the album? That’s right, “The Cure.” Mind you, it uses cure in the conventional sense, as in the thing for what ails you, not mentioning the band at all. Still, please observe the multicolored strings thumbtacked to the wall behind me—the title was clearly no coincidence. Even when it’s unverbalized, sonic nods to the Cure and the new wave in general are (almost) all over the album.
Why? To start, it’s a family affair. Rodrigo said on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show this week that her father has seen the Cure about 30 times. When she introduced him to Smith, her dad was in tears, she said, and he now uses a shot of them together as “ his screen saver on his phone .” (Meanwhile, she said, laughing, her metal-loving mom skipped her daughter’s set at Lollapalooza to go to the other stage and watch Korn.) But on another level, I think she’s turned to Smith as a muse, to help inspire her to take her songwriting to more complex zones beyond the conventional love or breakup song. As she told British Vogue in March, “ I realized all my favorite romantic love songs were beautiful because they had a tinge of fear or yearning in them .”
For his part, Smith told Vogue that he’d been a fan since he first heard “Drivers License,” and he bought both her previous albums on CD. “Although most of the songs on those two albums are not really ‘aimed at my demographic’ (!), they are all so good that it is hard not to fall in love with them.” And to BBC6, he said, “ I genuinely love what she does . I’m slightly in awe of how easy she finds it all.”
But Rodrigo isn’t the only young female American songwriter to call upon the Cure as a familiar. On the 2023 single “ Not Strong Enough ,” the indie supergroup Boygenius (Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker) described “drag-racing through the canyon / Singing ‘ Boys Don’t Cry .’ ” Somewhat longer ago, Paramore’s “ Caught in the Middle ” opened with a lyrical echo of “ In Between Days .” And Bridgers recorded her own cover of “ Friday I’m in Love ” as…
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