Is there something higher than an ink-fresh pop lyric so nailed-on that you could’t consider 60 years of songwriters didn’t get there first? Or like, no less than 20, ever since Googling crushes grew to become a wholly regular element of fashionable romance: “One night I was bored in bed / And stalked you on the internet,” Olivia Rodrigo sings on her comeback single, a informal admission with its personal innate melody destined in flip to stalk listeners’ brains all summer season. Her excellent couplet heralds an ecstatic refrain concerning the giddy terror of getting precisely what you needed, precisely the way you needed it, and barely having the ability to breathe or stifle puking: “The most alive I’ve ever been / But kiss me and I might drop dead!”
Acute, obsessive, unsparing songs about romance, at all times with a self-aware deal with on their depth – or a wink at how lovestruck women get labelled “crazy” – have change into Rodrigo’s trademark. (She calls her benign kind of on-line stalking “feminine intuition”.) Now 23, she broke out as a pop star in 2021, after a lifetime as a Disney Channel fixture, and pulled off one of the quickest, simplest and indelible acts of redefinition of any musician to emerge from that leisure monolith. (Even her pop peer and fellow Disney alum Sabrina Carpenter took 5 albums to search out success on her phrases.) Rodrigo’s debut single correct, Drivers License, was an epic heartbreak ballad, although the sticking factors of her debut album, Sour, have been the pop-punk ragers. She convincingly translated that into her second album, 2023’s Guts, which drew on the affect of her mum’s riot grrrl data; she scored mentorship from St Vincent, introduced the Breeders to help her on tour and bought the Cure’s Robert Smith to duet along with her when she headlined Glastonbury in 2025.
Drop Dead incorporates a informal flex alluding to her friendship with Smith: “You know all the words to Just Like Heaven,” she sings dreamily, “And I know why he wrote them.” (In a current Vogue cowl story, Smith mentioned the pair gab about style and have hit the studio collectively.) But it isn’t keen on persevering with to burnish her now-assured rock bona fides. Early expectations of the music’s title assumed it was a punky kiss-off, of a piece with Rodrigo’s hits Get Him Back! and Good 4 U – a logical conclusion after her first long-term relationship appeared to finish across the new yr. That’s the kind of secure holdover comeback hit that many pop stars use to ease followers into a new period: even Guts was led by the comparatively Drivers License-like Vampire earlier than exhibiting its extra calloused hand. But Drop Dead is a true pivot: a attractive rush of romantic depth that tries to cease time to savour the second, then dives headlong again into it, virtually queasy with runaway momentum. In the video – set on the Palace of Versailles, directed by Petra Collins – Rodrigo can’t cease operating, half Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette on the lam, half Emma Corrin’s Diana curler skating by means of Buckingham Palace in The Crown.
If something, Drop Dead sounds fairly a bit like Chappell Roan, with whom Rodrigo shares a producer in Dan Nigro: a whack of strings so maximalist it’s one bauble short of festive; Rodrigo hanging out in her highest vocal register for your complete refrain, anticipation incarnate. (Some of the melodic vocal bends are additionally undeniably Swiftian.) It’s so good it doesn’t actually matter, and comes with its personal beguiling in-built sense of collapse, hurtling in direction of the wreckage on wild, whitewater drums and a powerpop guitar solo that gleams like a skateboarder gliding down a rail – however then unravels. There’s a sense that each one this obsession begets an ending a lot messier and extra complicated than cleanly dropping useless, a fantasy just as soothing as fortunately ever after.
