Olivia Rodrigo: <em>SOUR</em>
7.7
GENRE: Pop/Pop-Rock
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2022The Disney-star-to-legitimate-artist pipeline has always been a precarious tightrope walk. For every Justin Timberlake who successfully sheds their Mickey Mouse Club skin, there’s a handful who stumble trying to prove their authenticity. When “drivers license” arrived in January 2021, it seemed Olivia Rodrigo might have cracked the code. The song wasn't just another teen pop moment—it was a masterclass in Gen Z storytelling, combining the confessional bedroom pop of Billie Eilish with the bridge-building dynamics of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well.” On SOUR, Rodrigo expands that viral moment into a full artistic statement, delivering an album that’s both carefully calculated and messily authentic, though not without its growing pains.
Producer Dan Nigro (who previously worked with Sky Ferreira and Conan Gray) helps orchestrate this duality throughout. The fake-out strings that open “brutal” before crashing into distorted guitars serve as a mission statement: this isn’t your standard Disney-star-goes-edgy narrative. The track channels the spirit of Avril Lavigne’s “My Happy Ending” through a modern lens, while “good 4 u” proves Rodrigo studied Paramore’s “Misery Business” as thoroughly as her SATs. These aren’t just aesthetic choices—they’re deliberate connections to a lineage of female rage in pop music, from Hole through to Soccer Mommy.
What makes SOUR compelling, though, isn’t just its genre-hopping but Rodrigo’s sharp pen, which seems to have absorbed everything from Swift’s narrative detail to Lorde’s social commentary. “Do you tell her she’s the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen?” she asks on “deja vu,” the kind of devastating detail that turns teenage diary entries into universal truth. The production here recalls Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel... in its use of found sounds and atmospheric tension, while “1 step forward, 3 steps back” directly interpolates Swift’s “New Year’s Day,” turning what could have been mere homage into something more complex about how we process relationships through the art we consume.
The generational divides become most apparent when SOUR tackles social media anxiety. “jealousy, jealousy” might seem heavy-handed with its grunge-lite arrangement and on-the-nose lyrics about Instagram, but it’s fascinating how Rodrigo processes female competition through both a 90s riot grrrl lens and a 2021 social media framework. The production draws from Garbage’s self-titled debut, while the lyrics could be pulled from a particularly self-aware TikTok caption. Similarly, “enough for you” reimagines Tori Amos-style confessional piano balladry for an era when vulnerability is both currency and content.
Not everything lands with equal impact. “hope ur ok” reaches for a social consciousness that feels more indebted to Disney Channel’s final acts than to genuine activism, while some of the ballads blur together in their piano-led catharsis. These moments remind us that Rodrigo is still developing her voice—though that development is happening at an impressively accelerated pace. When she sings “God, it’s brutal out here" over guitars that sound like Elastica scoring a doom-scrolling session, you believe both the performance and the sentiment.
SOUR succeeds because it understands how pop music can document cultural shifts in real time. When Rodrigo sings about “Watching reruns of Glee” or getting her driver’s license, she’s not just documenting her life—she’s capturing how her generation processes emotion through an endless feed of archived yet immediate references. Like The Velvet Underground’s banana or Sex Pistols’ ransom note, the stickers on Rodrigo’s tongue on the album cover feels like a perfect visual metaphor for its contents: a messy and deliberate vent from a young woman fed up with herself and the world around her. The image is destined to be replicated on bedroom walls and Instagram stories alike. And as such, SOUR is a debut that proves authenticity isn’t about rejecting artifice—it’s about knowing exactly which filters to use.
