Olivia Rodrigo debuts duet with Robert Smith at Primavera Sound

Olivia Rodrigo used a surprise popup at Primavera Sound to introduce a song that immediately broadened the frame around her next album: a duet with Robert Smith of The Cure, debuting “what’s wrong with me” in front of a Barcelona crowd on June 6, 2026.

The performance came only hours after Rodrigo was announced for the festival and followed a pattern of controlled surprise that has become part of her live strategy. Primavera Sound ran June 3-7 at Parc del Fòrum in Barcelona, Spain, and Rodrigo’s set landed just one day after The Cure played the same festival on Friday, June 5. That sequencing made the collaboration feel less like a one-off cameo than a deliberate meeting point between two eras of pop and alternative rock.

The song, reported as track 10 on Rodrigo’s forthcoming album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, is scheduled for release June 12, 2026, via Geffen Records. It is also a career first for Rodrigo: Forbes noted that she had not previously put another artist’s name on a song across SOUR, GUTS or the singles in between. In that sense, Smith’s appearance does more than add star power. It signals a shift in how Rodrigo is positioning herself, moving from the tightly authored confessional pop that built her first two albums toward a sound and presentation that can absorb older, darker, and more guitar-driven influences without losing mass appeal.

The collaboration also extends a relationship that began at Glastonbury in June 2025, when Smith joined Rodrigo onstage and they performed The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love” and “Just Like Heaven.” By bringing Smith back into her orbit at Primavera Sound, Rodrigo turned a festival surprise into a clear artistic statement: the lineage of alternative music is not just being sampled by younger pop stars, it is being actively folded into their work.

Rodrigo’s set also underlined how broadly she can now play across audiences. Alongside the premiere of “what’s wrong with me,” she performed “drop dead” and “the cure,” then moved through earlier hits including “bad idea right?,” “deja vu,” “all-american bitch” and “good 4 u.” With The Cure, Doja Cat, The xx, Gorillaz, Massive Attack, Addison Rae and My Bloody Valentine all on the 2026 bill, Primavera Sound already offered a cross-generational map of contemporary music. Rodrigo’s duet with Smith made that map feel personal, and for her catalogue, irreversible.