Olivia Rodrigo, pop princess of vengeful angst, tries her hand at love songs

"My god, love's embarrassing as hell," Olivia Rodrigo sang on her sophomore album Guts, inviting listeners, her voice dripping with self-deprecation, to "just watch as I crucify myself, for some weird, second string loser who's not worth mentioning."Unfortunately love is embarrassing, but it might be potentially more so for a singer-songwriter who has publicly dissected her romantic mistakes in near-real time since the age of 17.At times those missteps have been devastating, like a teenaged break-up that inspired her 2021 breakout hit "Drivers License." Or they've been rage-inducing, such as when Rodrigo skewered a villainous "fame f*****" older ex who bled her dry on "Vampire." Sometimes her mistakes are just fun, like the conflicted bad girl energy of songs like "get him back!" and "bad idea right?", with Rodrigo chasing more "second string losers" because, well, sometimes they're hot and really good kissers, what else is there to explain?Rodrigo's new album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, is the story of one big mistake.

It details in chronological order the disintegration of her first, self-described "real, big girl" relationship, from those swoony first dates to feelings of alienation in a dynamic that's clearly wrong for her.For months the gossip blogs rumored that Rodrigo, now 23, had intended to release an album fully committed to telling a love story, but had to rework the album after a publicized breakup.

As she described it in a recent Popcast interview, Rodrigo had written most of the album's first half of the record, before writing the breakup songs that close it and editing the entire project to fit together."We had the fun challenge of going back and actually tweaking some of the love songs on the record and making them a little more honest and more sad and creepy," she said.

In an age where relationships and break-ups are immortalized on carefully curated social media profiles for everyone to consume, and young women avoid posting thei...