Olivia Rodrigo - You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love

https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/69ce96d85f00b67a0c52ea65/master/w_1600,c_limit/Olivia-Rodrigo-You-Seem-Pretty-Sad-for-a-Girl-So-in-Love.jpeg

you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love will be released by Geffen Records on June 12, 2026.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78wrful9cVU

A Cure reference, love it.

I like all those high harmonies. I have a Rodrigo-obsessed tween, so I'm going to hear it a lot this weekend...

It's a treat!

alright song but i hate the mix, it's super compressed and flat. there's a lot going on but you can't make out any of the details.

feels like it's going for a stylised lo-fi thing except like, why would you ever do that to a string-driven song like this?

there's also just not really any charm from putting cleanly-produced front & centre pop vocals over relatively lo-fi production

This song didn't give me the same rush as "Vampire " did or is in the same league as "Drivers License." It does have hooks and is fun. One listen in.

lucky for me all this Cure bullshit flies right over my head, otherwise LET'S GO

ok "Just Like Heaven" was a bit on the nose, even i get that

I like it. The loved up semi-spoken second verse is pure Don't Delete the Kisses.

why does this video look like someone left motion smoothing active on their TV

because it's 50fps

this is especially strange to combine with the vhs filter

Good single. I sat the last record out, but might have to give this one a shot.

Last record was better than the debut!

yeah, it's not for me, but I enjoyed everything I heard from it.

I liked a couple singles from the debut, and wasn't all that wowed by the ones I heard from the follow-up; thus, I suspected her of having a limited palette. I still sorta do, but the new one just sounded really nice and catchy to me.

ah to be young and in love. i love the versailles setting for the video.

This is really nice but not quite Guts-level nice yet, maybe

when she's fast she's good (now there's a new wave song title)

agree with that. the last album's rockers were awesome. the ballads were just OK. it was like two albums in one.

maybe i'm just impatient, though.

I really want to like this more than I do, because she's such a great performer and likeable personality, but this isn't grabbing me. But I preferred Deja Vu over Drivers License and I preferred Bad Idea Right over Vampire so I hope she keeps the pattern of saving the best songs for the second single

Why is she going so hard for the nonce market with the styling for this? Every time I see a promo or a post about it she’s wearing a little-girl outfit with her hair in pigtails and it really fucking sucks because her music has never been that vibe AT ALL.

Like I’m a little shocked nobody mentioned this aspect of the video ngl because it was not what I was expecting when I read “filmed in Versailles” and yes it’s more than a little gross!

https://i.postimg.cc/Kz86Z6zt/IMG-2929.jpg

^ comment not mine but otm re plausible deniability

song is a little stiff imo, still looking forward to the record

no opinion on whether she’s dressing up as a baby, mostly looked at the cover art and thought “oh i’d wear that dress,” i guess many people would consider me part of the problem

i know artists style themselves very intentionally in order to convey a narrative but i'm also wary of suggesting a woman is dressing to attract a certain kind of gaze

i was a little weirded out by the outfit tbf

xp uh

ok i'll drop out of this conversation

not gonna comment on the outfit but I will say I've always felt she serenades the Pop Needs Real Instruments Rolling Stone demographic, musically speaking

okay maybe I am gonna comment a bit. gyac otm - that she's gone this way in her aesthetics is an extremely unfortunate way to corroborate and build on what i've felt about her music

i liked her first album for what it was. fun pop punk. haven't listened to much subsequent stuff. this outfit is almost certainly intended to cause controversy, especially in this epstein zeitgeist, and i find that incredibly depressing and bleak.

kinda hilarious how public she's been about charting a course for her own aesthetic taste only to keep releasing lead singles that sound like taylor swift singles... the woman really loves taylor swift. i like this song well enough, i don't think it gives you much to chew on, it sounds a lot like taylor swift, tho it's actually better than most latter day taylor swift

Yeah, I had a similar impression of the song, the Taylor template and not so fresh now.

okay maybe I am gonna comment a bit. gyac otm - that she's gone this way in her aesthetics is an extremely unfortunate way to corroborate and build on what i've felt about her music

― imago, Monday, April 20, 2026 11:20 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i liked her first album for what it was. fun pop punk. haven't listened to much subsequent stuff. this outfit is almost certainly intended to cause controversy, especially in this epstein zeitgeist, and i find that incredibly depressing and bleak.

― treeship., Monday, April 20, 2026 11:53 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

ok, so, when i watched the video for the first time, i thought "that outfit looks really comfortable to sleep in" because it is a sheer soft-looking babydollish nightgown + bloomers, just the right amount of fabric to be enmeshed in when you're going to bed, and the vibe of the video was like "i am really excited about my crush in bed in the middle of the night but my bed happens to be in versailles," and i guess i've given you all of these impressions because none of them remotely entered the realm of "this looks targeted toward pedophiles," which, beyond that, i really don't give a shit how olivia rodrigo or sabrina carpenter choose to dress generally, let alone this way, but it's just hard for me to see it as "more than a little gross" because... who's being gross here? is there a direct causal link between women "dressing like babies" (which i've already established i don't think rodrigo is doing here) and csa? does it as i've seen in some corners of the internet "promote pedophilia"? i sorta think the more likely "promoters" of pedophilia in our world are, like, the existence of the catholic church and the nuclear family and a culture defined by male sexualization of women which targets them from the instant they're born. how women choose to dress in this environment is irrelevant to me because they will be sexualized no matter how they present themselves. i wear babydoll dresses because they make me feel nice and embodied and unfortunately i have no control over how men perceive me in that sort of outfit so i have to not care. and i'm sure olivia rodrigo as someone who came up as a disney teen star has felt this immediate, overwhelming sexualization from older men, and is familiar with it, and knows that she can't win, and chose to wear something cute and comfortable in her video

I guess that’s your conclusion. Thanks for the explainer as to how men sexualise women from the moment they are born, as though my conclusion wasn’t at least partially formed as someone who did have adult men making comments to me as a 12 year old in my school uniform. Having been a fan of Rodrigo for her previous persona in her music and how she’s presented herself publicly to date, it’s pretty fucking disappointing to have yet another female pop star lean into the sexy baby look. It’s worse when it’s singers like Olivia, Sabrina, and Ariana who have previously been pretty forthright about their adult sexuality. I don’t like it when grown women feel the need to portray themselves in this manner.

Thankfully we can assume that pop music never knowingly sexualises young women for profit, right?
https://i.postimg.cc/cHhvV3Sf/IMG-2943.jpg

I don't think there's any way for a woman to be the right kind of woman - you can't be too youthful because it's creepy but you can't be too old because you're past it, you can't wear make-up or have surgery because it's fake but you have to look nice and pretty regardless, and you can't be too passive but you can't be difficult, and you can't enjoy sexuality but you also cannot be frigid, and you can't play it safe and straddle the fence because then you're boring, and no matter what you do as a famous women you are always going to be told off for it.

I'm choosing to interpret the babydoll look as an homage to Courtney Love and Shirley Manson at their peak but I can see why it would make people uneasy here because Rodrigo isn't seen as that kind of woman.

gyac, i said all of that being aware of your experiences, and the "explainer" was more intended for the very stupid men who followed up your post. furthermore i do not understand what i'm supposed to see in that photo you posted

xp

xp Courtney and Shirley were wearing those babydoll dresses with cigarettes hanging from their mouths and smeared lipstick and with a heavy dose of irony. This is just the aesthetic without either the same irony or insight. It’s “Just A Girl” vs whatever Sabrina thought she was doing when she decided to sing “I’m full grown but I look like a niña.”

yeah but like, the discourse is not about whether it's insufficiently ironic. it's about how she's wrong and bad for targeting pedophiles

Maybe this isn’t a britney in the 90s thing idk. Just seemed like it.

she’s wearing a little-girl outfit with her hair in pigtails

but she's not doing that?

Yeah sorry my bad I mistook her headphones for pigtails in passing. She’s wearing a little girl outfit with headphones.

god not like this needs my input in any way, but i did feel a certain "ruling class fantasy" vibe from the video tbh. so youth objectification to the degree it's happening or not wouldn't exactly be a shocking accusation imo, it kinda tracks. on that level it does sound a lot like taylor swift.

tapping into the libidinal zeitgeist of the times, as fucked up as it may be, seems like a promising way to become a big star - i'm assuming that's the goal in this case.

i really don't give a shit how olivia rodrigo or sabrina carpenter choose to dress generally

nor do i

but this isn't about how they dress is it, it's about how they and their people have chosen to mediate them and their popstar status in their most prominent public communications of 2026

gyac aside here but men having extremely strong opinions on the appropriateness of a young woman pop star's clothing always strikes me as extremely weird and off putting, deep "the call is coming from inside the house" vibes

applies equally to both pro and con

i don't think a man w/o an opinion on this is projecting their own insecurities, weird personal history/opinions etc onto everyone else thru the medium of a female pop star's music video outfit...

I knew you guys were all bots

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/olivia-rodrigo-baby-doll-dress-controversy-1235560600/

The Olivia Rodrigo Dress Outrage Feels Like Bot Behavior
The internet keeps finding issue with the singer’s baby doll dresses, claiming her look evokes that of a “toddler”

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/t78AAeSwPXpp-BDJ/s-l960.webp

Yeah sweet my questions about her presentation get to be full on "i hate music" fodder

This thread didn't turn out how I thought it would.

"The Cure"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B402rKl4bUg

I am/was taking a break from ilx because it was becoming a bit too toxic for me. A lot of that had to do with this very thread. But when Olivia Rodrigo releases a song titled after my all-time favorite band, well I'm all for it!

Very 'Disarm' coded. I like it.

v good

oh yeah this is extremely "disarm" lol

This might sound crazy but first song this reminded me of is Neutral Milk Hotel’s Two-headed Boy. It’s all in the acoustic strumming

her best acoustic ballad???? very "disarm" yes

Could this be her New Jersey? Underwhelmed by it all so far.

Quite the opposite, what I’ve heard so far sounds great.

"Disarm" is indeed a great comparison. Fine track.

I thought "Everlong" was starting when I first queued it up.

Rodrigo was quizzed on the potential World Goth Day/The Cure connection on the Elvis Duran Show, but confirmed that she wasn’t even aware of it.

“Honestly, this song, The Cure, has nothing to do with the band, The Cure – although I love [the band] so much – but it is just a happy coincidence, I suppose,” she says.

Rodrigo previously revealed that The Cure is her favourite song on her forthcoming new album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, and she said something similar to Duran.

"I'm really really proud of this song,” she says. “I absolutely love it and I'm really excited for people to hear it. I think it's like a new perspective that I haven't really had the maturity maybe to express before in earlier albums. And yeah, I'm really obsessed with it. I'm really excited to put it out.”

Beginning with rhythmic acoustic guitar strums and vocals, The Cure has one of Rodrigo’s trademark big choruses and builds to a pounding crescendo complete with drums, synths and strings.

Discussing her evolution as a songwriter more generally, Rodrigo says that she’s come to appreciate the importance of editing.

"I think editing is a really important part of the creative process that I didn't really realise when I was younger,” she notes. “When I was younger, making stuff, I was kind of just like vomiting an idea and being like, ‘Let's put it out.’ And I think it's really fun for me to go in and refine things and tweak things. I think there's something kind of beautiful and artistic about that.”

These edits, says Rodrigo, are on the production side, too – “little things that maybe nobody else would notice, but something that me and my producer [Dan Nigro] just spend hours kind of tweaking.”

And yes, before you ask, Rodrigo is still in regular contact with Robert Smith, who she duetted with at Glastonbury last year. “We talk, like, every week,” she reports. “He's amazing.”

https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/olivia-rodrigo-babydoll-dress-controversy

https://consequence.net/2026/05/olivia-rodrigo-criticism-clothing/
Looks like ILX really is relevant!

And I felt cool and comfortable in it.

“What’s really, like, disturbing is I feel like I have worn outfits that are revealing on stage,” Rodrigo noted. “I’ve been on stage in a sparkly bra, little shorts, which is my right. That’s fun. I felt cool and comfortable in that. And that wasn’t ‘inappropriate,’ but me, fully covered up in a dress that people deem to be, like, childlike was ‘inappropriate.’ And I just it just like shows how we really normalize pedophilia in our culture."

We normalize it by, uh, calling it inappropriate?

Or is she saying that her previous outfits were more pedophile-friendly?

She is saying we normalize pedophilia by saying that wearing "childlike" clothing is sexy

you might disagree but I don't think her point is unclear

I think if she thinks she's doing the same thing as Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna then she's got her head in the sand a bit.

The Vogue piece that piscesx posted is pretty sharp on that imo. I think it's undeniable that she isn't doing the same thing as riot grrrl, but drilling into what's different or problematic about her version gets tricky (at least it does for me, a cis-het man). I'm also struck by the dead obvious fact that only women can run afoul of this dilemma -- again the Vogue piece is sound on this -- trying to imagine the straight male equivalent of this is impossible

Well, sure-- perhaps the biggest news story of the past decade has been about straight male pedophiles and their enablers. That's not Rodrigo's fault obviously, but saying that she used to wear sexy outfits onstage and now she's wearing little girls clothes and can't figure out why people think she's still trying to dress sexy is some I-was-born-yesterday thinking.

ok buddy but that is still putting the onus of this dynamic on women which continues to be my beef with men weighing in here. i don’t think it significantly matters that rodrigo’s presentation is less obviously “subversive” especially since, as she says in that piece, she wore it bc it felt cute and comfortable

and i guess i wouldn’t say it’s even the dominant aesthetic of the record visually anymore unless ppl want to talk about how dressing as a nurse invites some sort of unseemly male attention, once again not her problem

i just think there’s a lot of even weird projection in looking at someone wearing that kind of dress and thinking “she looks like a sexy baby”

and let’s not forget that a lot of what inspired my previous posts on this subject was the insinuation that she was doing it on purpose to attract a certain kind of attention

and i think her not articulating herself all that consistently in response to this baffling discourse is also like… neither would i

if i’m not supposed to dress a certain way bc pedophiles run the world then… what

pretty much. posts in this thread continue to be part of that baffling discourse pushing some insane weight of the world stuff onto what style of dress this person wears. stop it.

The Vogue piece that piscesx posted is pretty sharp on that imo. I think it's undeniable that she isn't doing the same thing as riot grrrl, but drilling into what's different or problematic about her version gets tricky (at least it does for me, a cis-het man). I'm also struck by the dead obvious fact that only women can run afoul of this dilemma -- again the Vogue piece is sound on this -- trying to imagine the straight male equivalent of this is impossible

As someone who made near exactly the same points re grunge era babydoll and how it’s nothing like this only to come to a conclusion that was the exact opposite, I can’t say I agree! Obviously I am not coming from a cishet male perspective though.

i mean the vogue piece was written by a woman, so i'm not sure that's coming from a cishet male perspective either

anyway i think we should move beyond this discourse to some other subject

That’s great, thank you for putting me in my place yet again

If ACDC dude can dress like a schoolboy Olivia can dress like a schoolgirl and pedos can fuck off.

"the cure" is great. surely one of her best?

Yeah it's easily my favourite by her.

is artists putting "Parental Advisory" stickers on their cover art the 2026 version of having some variation of "Stereophonic Recording" in the early/mid-2000s?

they still make edited versions of albums

So are those labels mainly to differentiate between the clean and dirty versions? Do labels bother with the parental advisory label the way they used to?

I'm really looking forward to this album, I think it’s going to be great. Still hate this thread but hope the music wins out in the end.

Sounds like this album has basically the narrative arc of Tunnel of Love, which is promising.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/arts/music/olivia-rodrigo-new-album-interview-popcast.html

I'm not a modern pop girlie expert by any stretch, but Olivia seems more along the lines of a chill Billie Eilish-type than a Taylor Swift or Charli XCX, where every facet of the public-facing personality is meticulously designed.

I guess both are valid ways to be an artist, but I'm much more interested in the former approach.

Anyway, "The Cure" is fantastic and the Popcast interview was a good time.

I guess the babydoll dress thing has broken contain from rockcrit spaces because I found out the the other day that my wife has a take on it and she doesn't care anything about Olivia or pop chat in general. She tended to agree with a few of the folks here that while Olivia obviously isn't responsible for pedos being pedos, she was being at least somewhat disingenuous by likening her look to Hanna/Courtney or acting like she wasn't aware that she's playing into some icky fetishization.

"The Cure" has been on repeat since release and "Drop Dead" has grown on me. There wasn't a ton of meat in the Popcast interview but I was thrilled to hear references to New Order, Devo, and, duh, the Cure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJTZXZWxEAY

Comment:
FYI, this is the last Live Lounge to be recorded at BBC's legendary Maida Val studios - what a way to sign off