Graham Reid | | <1 min read
While we open with our customary “she doesn't make music for us” caveat, we can't help but see the teen appeal of this sassy, f-wording 20-year old who came to attention via the High School Musical series, had a massive debut single (Drivers License) and now on this second album offers an implosion of noisy indie guitar rock alongside rap-like rhyming couplets, her chart-topping single Vampire (which nails a former boyfriend she calls a "fame-fucker”) and songs loaded with teenage concerns about love and relationships.
It's an album about being 20, with all the ennui and angst that entails.
All-American Bitch is an astute opener (she's said it's about “this repressed anger and feeling of confusion or trying to be put into a box as a girl”) and Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl is a terrific tension-release rock song.
Olivia Rodrigo on the evidence here is far too good to be dismissed as just another teen pop star, there's maturity, thoughtfulness and a sense of tightly wound desperation here.
And great songs.
I think she's made music for us.
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You can hear this album at Spotify here.
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