![]() “I feel like music is becoming increasingly genreless,” she says, thoughtfully. On her debut album, Rodrigo promises to showcase more versatility. Harshness creeps up in the track’s glossy indie-pop sound palette, with ice-cream van jingles giving way to crashing drums and distorted vocals. It’s a tongue-in-cheek track about an ex doing all the things you used to do together – watching reruns of Glee, going on trips to Malibu and, um, listening to Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl – but with someone new. ![]() Almost instantly, hundreds of TikTokers rushed to put their own spin on drivers license.Īpril’s bittersweet follow-up single deja vu proved to anyone in doubt that Rodrigo’s more than a one-hit wonder. Sure, drivers license ’s success was spurred on by gossip around her will-they-won’t‑they relationship with HSM co-star Joshua Bassett and his rumoured new girlfriend Sabrina Carpenter, but receiving praise from Taylor Swift? That’s purely down to Rodrigo’s talent. Rodrigo’s industry acclaim happened overnight. Stars like Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez were gradually embraced by the music industry after stints on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, respectively. We’ve seen this kind of phenomenon before. When Rodrigo wrote the pining song All I Want – which she performed in character as Nini – for the series last year, it suddenly clicked that solo songwriting was a viable career option for her. Naturally, Nini gets cast as Gabriella, a role originated by Vanessa Hudgens. From there, she went straight into playing the lead role of Nini in Disney Plus’ High School Musical reboot series, which got meta by telling the story of students in a high-school production of the original film. At 12 years old, she starred as the clumsy and kind Paige in Disney Channel’s series Bizaardvark, which followed two best friends as they made video blogs for their online comedy channel. The sensation is that of the gravity under you changing again, again, and again.Rodrigo’s journey is the age-old tale of child-actor-turned-pop-sensation writ large. The best moment is in the bridge, when Rodrigo’s rambling cadence slides into a Freddy Mercury–like wail, which stretches and modulates for a beat or two longer than seems natural. The way that the arrangement falls to silence around the big declaration of the chorus-“bloodsucker / fame fucker”-is an old trick, but the jackhammering guitar that comes right after is a shock, a chaser more potent than the shot. The more-than-a-minute-long intro is slow in an illusory way Rodrigo’s vocal itself keeps a brisk tempo, which the song’s accumulating percussion later underlines. Read: Pop’s buzziest new songwriter knows exactly what to sayīut the spark of the song comes from the way its simple elements layer into crushing heaviness. She also still sings in that bizarre accent that singer-songwriters have employed for years now-parties are “pourties” torture is “tuh-hor-ture”-to build drama. As on much of Sour, Rodrigo’s melody is made up of short phrases that stack like Legos. ![]() ![]() This is likely to be divisive: Rodrigo and her producer, Dan Nigro, channel her previously stated inspirations (Fiona Apple, Billy Joel), but also some surprising, and daringly corny, artists ( Muse, Mika). The track is piano rock, tapping into a tradition of theatrical angst that leashes wild feelings to the tight, tidy jabbing of keys. Her first single in two years, “ Vampire,” pushes her confessional-pop appeal to a sizzling extreme, and you’d have to be undead to not feel a little excitement. But happily, she opted to try to live up to the title of her forthcoming album, Guts. ![]() Her new song could have been a rehash of one of her hits, or it could have appropriated some trending sound (how long before we get Disney drill?). Of course, many promising new voices before her have made compromises in order to stay in the spotlight once they’ve attained it. So over the past two years, as she worked on her second album, curiosity mounted: Where would she go next? The listening public, as it turned out, could handle a star who careened from piano balladry to emo to experimental pop and even hard rock. Chatty lyrics and breathy singing defined her debut album, Sour, but her hit singles-especially “Driver’s License,” “Good 4 U,” “Deja Vu,” and “Brutal”-were eclectic. In 2021, the then-teenage Disney actor conquered the Billboard Hot 100 with not just a fresh face and a smart marketing campaign, but a sense of musical possibility, hinting that commercial pop still had new directions to evolve in. Hype comes in many varieties, most of them despicable, but the buzz that preceded Olivia Rodrigo’s new single was the relatively healthy sort. ![]()
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