Olivia Rodrigo review, Sour: Disarming honesty makes for an impressive debut

When 18-year-old Olivia Rodrigo sang “drivers license” at the Brit Awards this month, I smiled to see the outline of a butterfly projected onto the stage behind her. Her debut single's delicate tale of teenage heartbreak has proved pop’s own butterfly effect, causing a huge storm in the music industry.

“It just ballooned into this monster … unlike anything anyone’s seen before,” Jeremy Erlich, co-head of music at Spotify, told The New York Times. “drivers licence” became the fastest song to surpass 100 million streams in the platform’s history and quickly blew up on TikTok. Because Rodrigo appeared to be singing about how Joshua Bassett (her co-star in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series) was rumoured to have left her for fellow Disney Channel star Sabrina Carpenter, there was endless scope for speculation and side-taking. When both Bassett and Carpenter released response songs, it started to look as though the entire soap opera had been masterminded by Disney.

But you only have to listen to Rodrigo discuss the technicalities of songwriting for a minute (she loves sevenths, suspended notes and ascending chords) to realise she’s no Mickey Mouse Club puppet. Her debut album, Sour, introduces a young craftswoman who’s clearly studied at the feet of her heroes, Taylor Swift and Lorde. She’s learnt how to spin her experience of 21st-century adolescence into enthralling story-songs that resonate on a universal level. And she’s dropping perfectly targeted F-bombs from the off. Former child stars don’t usually do that until they’re onto the post-breakdown record. But on Sour, messy emotions and the raw use of organic instruments break through the shiny surfaces we’ve come to expect from such glossy girls.

Produced by Dan Nigro (who co-wrote “drivers license” with her) Sour got its title because Rodrigo is “obsessed with the concept of awesome things in my life – like my relationship with myself and with others – progressively going sour as I get older”. The record opens with “brutal”, a rackety blast of mall-grunge on which Rodrigo has a blast releasing all her teenage angst and unpicking her shiny celebrity image. “Might quit my job,” she sings. “They’ll all be so disappointed cos who am I if not exploited?” Later she admits she only has two real friends and “I hate every song I write… the ego crush is so severe”. Her wit isn’t quite as sharp as Swift’s, but her honesty is disarming.

After that first track, we’re into the breakup stuff. Against the slo-mo, snow-crunch beat of “traitor”, Rodrigo describes being gaslit (“Remember I brought her up and you told me I was paranoid?”) and nails a tidy chorus: “It took you two weeks to go off and date her/ Guess you didn’t cheat, but you’re still a traitor.” Then there’s the piano-backed “drivers license” that narrates her driving through suburbia while contemplating her ex, who’s “probably with that blonde girl/ Who always made me doubt/ She’s so much older than me/ She’s everything I'm insecure about…” Her hurt, fluttering vocal is whispered right into the listener’s ear until she lets rip with the sudden squall of the chorus line: “Guess you didn't mean what you wrote in that song about me.”

Against the pretty chimes and sweet singing of “deja vu”, Rodrigo rolls her eyes at a guy pulling the same old moves on his new girlfriend: “So when you gonna tell her that we did that, too?/ She thinks it's special, but it’s all reused.” And by “good 4 u”, the anger is no longer served cold. It’s channelled by electric guitars and the ex is “a damn sociopath”. “jealousy, jealousy” is driven by a pacing bass groove as the singer sighs: “I think I think too much about kids who don’t know me/ I’m so sick of myself…”

At times, it feels as though the polite, considered Rodrigo could push ideas, emotions and melodies a little further than she does. Twenty years ago, dumped teenage girls could bawl along with Alanis Morissette as she howled: “Every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back I hope you feel it”. Sour is more restrained. In its spacey, reverb-soaked mood, it carries something of the social paralysis caused by the pandemic. Perhaps that’s because kids these days are trying harder to be reasonable. You can certainly hear Rodrigo – a therapist’s child – doing her best to see situations from all angles. She hopes her ex is “happy” now. She assumes mature responsibility for her own heartbreak against the fairy-fingered guitar picking of “favorite crime”. But this is an incredibly impressive debut from a singer who’s only just learning to stretch her wings. I’m looking forward to seeing her use them to whip up many more storms in the future.