This odd, funereal song broke streaming records and spent eight weeks as No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, signaling the arrival of either a new powerhouse entertainer or a one-hit wonder. To anyone paying attention to Rodrigo, the safe bet has been on her longevity. In interviews, performances, and on social media, she radiates poise and approachability: attributes of a successful child actor, but also of the newer kind of teen idol, the TikTok influencer. She is good at singing and even better at vocal performing—at stringing together pouts, whispers, yelps, and chitchat to keep every syllable exciting. She has absorbed the techniques of Taylor Swift on a number of levels (cadence, lyrics, image management), but she also projects so much personality in her music that it would be silly to call her a copy.
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The title of her debut album, Sour, cuts against the sentimental teen-pop lineage of the Beach Boys, Gibson, or early Swift. Rodrigo is not gunning to be America’s Sweetheart—though one imagines that the way to achieve that title in 2021 is exactly by rejecting it. Whether the example is the haunted aesthetic of Billie Eilish or the meme-baiting taunts of Doja Cat, recent breakout musicians use their vitality to perform jadedness. Their disaffection can end up being weirdly digestible, though. Across the lightly adventurous music of Sour, Rodrigo embodies a trend of treating songwriting as an act of explanation rather than exploration.
The fantastic opener, “Brutal,” for example, explains that she’s not just a sad ballad singer. Some of Rodrigo’s songs recall Radio Disney rock, but here the guitar riff is scary in the manner of Clinton-era Nine Inch Nails. That riff becomes acoustic strums in the verses so that Rodrigo can charge up energy like an anime superhero between bouts in a battle. In a shouted rap, Rodrigo delivers as concise and relatable a rant about the adolescent condition as anyone will ever record. It’s made only more delicious by the fact that the person complaining “I’m so sick of 17 / Where’s my fuckin’ teenage dream?” might be the luckiest kid alive right now. Rather than continue to escalate, the track winds down in less than two minutes and 30 seconds.
From there, the album dives back into the “Drivers License” mode of patient, well-crafted, post-breakup memoir—though mostly without the transcendence provided by that smash’s bridge. “Traitor” uses the fashionable technique of building an eerie soundscape out of vocal ahhhs, and Rodrigo lays out her case against her ex: Two weeks after they broke up, he started dating the girl he’d told her not to worry about. “Guess you didn’t cheat, but you’re still a traitor,” she sings—a good line that’s almost lawyerly in its delineation between the letter and the spirit of the rules of relationships. The breakup she’s talking about in this and most of the album’s tracks appears to be the same famous one that reportedly inspired “Drivers License.” She’s belaboring a personal episode in a way that’s valid and understandable, but that also yields diminishing returns for the listener.