Olivia Rodrigo's new album wasn't announced with a song, but a color.
The superstar, whose last album was 2023's blockbuster GUTS, began teasing her new record by painting a purple wall on Melrose Ave in Los Angeles a bright baby pink.
The switch in colors signaled something profound to Rodrigo's fans, as silly as it may sound to those outside of the deepest dregs of online pop discourse. Most pop stars, like Charli xcx (who is going from the club to rock music) or — ahem — Taylor Swift, swing in aesthetic from album to album. Rodrigo, though, stayed in her purple visual world on her first two albums' covers, which both featured a similar early-aughts rock sound. The switch in color, no matter how trivial it appeared, was a signal that the musical shift to come would be substantive.
I'm still parsing if that's what happened, now that her full album — you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love — is out in the world today, June 12. Like her past work, its primary subject is heart ache, but this time she utilizes a sonic palette more indebted to the post-punk poetry of The Cure, who are name checked in a song title and whose lead singer, Robert Smith, is the album's sole guest feature.
And even as she lets the post-punk driving drums and repetitive melodic refrains take the fore, Rodrigo still makes time on this record to nod to her past world, naming a key track in the album after her former favored color, "purple." On the song, color is a metaphor for the enmeshment of love. She sings, "Your red and my blue / Now I see the world in / Purple." Rather than this mixing being transcendent, Rodrigo illustrates it as all consuming, stifling: "I had big dreams ‘til I tied myself to you / Now I’m all consumed."
Maybe the nod to her former defining color is a happy accident, or a smiling nod to a detail that her fans will eat up. But I tend to think that for most modern pop stars, "the curtains are never just blue," to quote the famous Tumblr/Reddit debate about reading into symbolism.
There's so much about the modern pop economy that traffics on pure meta signification. Since the advent of Taylor Swift's easter eggs, each stan pop community has its own language and lore; like Marvel movies or Star Wars, the contemporary pop star, who lives and dies by his or her most dedicated merch-buying fans, must feed their fans this discursive manna to maintain the bottom line. There's a fun in living in this intimate community, with its own story and symbols, but there's also something small and self-aggrandizing about it too. It's hard to know where the line between artful expression and pure brand world-building lies.
On "purple," I sense the looming presence of self-mythology, but I also have to applaud Rodrigo's undeniable craft. Her metaphors and lyrics feel precise, and sturdy. There's a studied quality to her work (it makes sense that super-writer and frequent Sabrina Carpenter-collaborator Amy Allen is also on the credits). And the Dan Nigro production glimmers with its typical emo-hued sparkle.
Maybe this time, her meta self-reference still glimmers with a timeless pop magic.
