The 23-year-old American singer-songwriter, actress, and evidently big fan of The Cure returns with consummately crafted, smart, witty pop laced with indie goth, featuring an appearance by Robert Smith, and charting the arc of a romantic relationship from unbridled joy to bitter aftermath in her third LP. It’s a leap into new maturity, not least with Smith gracing the stage with her at at Glastonbury last year, and stylistically since the brattier pop punk of 2023’s album Guts and 2021’s Sour. This is stylish, shimmering, refined songwriting, several numbers including that distinctive 80s guitar twang and strum rhythms of classic Cure tracks, the amiable old goth-pop veteran and new friend clearly a huge influence. Meanwhile whichever ex-boyfriend the gossip press like to imagine this is all about, famous actor or otherwise, is meanwhile ultimately irrelevant.
Opener Drop Dead (which includes a lyrical reference the Cure’s Just Like Heaven) captures the early flush of a hot date in a bar, and Rodrigo singing “You know all the words to Just Like Heaven / And I know why he wrote them now that you're standin' right here,” and compares her new squeeze to “an angel on the walls of Versailles”. Stupid Song is another pop banger, also packed with excited superlatives in the rush of excitement: “You're a spark in the dark and my clothes all caught aflame / You should feel how I feel when somebody says your name / I'm a car speeding down the boulevard without a brake / And I want you more than any stupid song could ever say.” Honeybee is a swooning, romantic piano ballad, Maggots For Brains, with electronic beats with the first of the album’s echoes of Cure-ish twanging guitar sound, captures the insecurities and vulnerabilities of having fallen in love and her boyfriend is absent: “I'm a zombie in my body, I'm a train off of the track /I feel dirty, I feel rotten, and the colors are all flat / I'm a sad shell of a woman and I've got maggots for brains/ But that's just a thing that happens when my / When my baby goes away.” The head-over-heels mood elation continues with the even more indie-pop u + me = <3, but things begin to go awry over a tensions with a girlfriend crossing boundaries with her new boyfriend: “It's a little hard to stomach all your amateur moves / You know he's with me, like obviously / But you linger in the air just like a bad perfume”, with a bitchy rapping middle eight.
Yet Purple, almost at the halfway point, takes a different mood, capturing a penumbra moment where things don’t quite seem right and darken into black into mediocrity and jealousy (“Now a toothbrush / A coat and pair of shoes all come in doubles /. And we fight / Over who I'm hanging out with like a real couple … Melt with you 'til it all turns black / Melt with you 'til it just feels sad.” The Cure (actually song title) is an acoustic number of increasing melancholy seeking an antidote to these sinking feelings, and has another very strong chorus (“But my head is full of poison, and my heart is full of doubt / I got toxins in my bloodstream, you tried hard to suck 'em out”). On her collaboration with Smith, in which their voices are complementary, What’s Wrong With Me, take the melancholy to new soaring levels: “I can't eat, I can't sleep / I think you're what's wrong with me.” The final three tracks capture more mood swings into the end of the relationship, from the quieter Less, the catchy, bitchy banger Expectations, into slowly uncoiling closer Cigarette Smoke: “Some nights can be / So fucking lonely / But it's better than begging for you to stand up for me, honeybee.” Entertaining, heartfelt, drily humorous, but also genuinely lived in, a journey of clever pop from a genuinely talented star. Out on Geffen.
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