Sasha Alex Sloan has a (hit) song for that

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Set us as preferred More than once this past spring, Sasha Alex Sloan woke up in a panic, convinced she’d spilled the juicy music-industry secret with which she’d been entrusted: Olivia Rodrigo had recorded a duet with the Cure’s Robert Smith.“I would literally open my eyes and be like, did I tell anyone?” says Sloan, who co-wrote the song “What’s Wrong With Me,” with Rodrigo and the singer’s longtime producer, Daniel Nigro.“My OCD was telling me, ‘You did — you tweeted it.’”In fact, the 31-year-old songwriter kept a lid on the news until Rodrigo surprise-debuted the tune with Smith himself at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival in June — an occasion Sloan calls “one of the coolest moments of my career, just being on my couch at home, watching it on the internet.” A week later, the heartsick “What’s Wrong With Me” helped drive Rodrigo’s third album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” to the second-biggest opening of 2026 (after BTS’ “Arirang”); this month, the singer told the Hollywood Reporter that the duet with Smith is the best track on the LP.Now, “What’s Wrong” and “You Seem Pretty Sad” are both expected to land multiple Grammy nods when nominations are announced Nov.

16.Yet among Sloan’s competition is … herself, thanks to her work as a songwriter on another two-hander: Karol G and Bruno Mars’ glossy “Still,” which she wrote with the siblings Isabel and Thomas LaRosa and which has more than 75 million streams on Spotify and YouTube.

In addition to the hit duets, Sloan has racked up credits this year on a wide variety of tunes by country singer Tucker Wetmore (“Yours”), the K-pop girl group Aespa (“Switchblade”) and veteran R&B star Ne-Yo (“Wish I Didn’t Know You”).She’s also got a funny and moving bedroom-pop album ...