Olivia Rodrigo softens her sound with breakup-shadowed love songs

Olivia Rodrigo’s third studio album arrived as a sharp pivot from the breakup anthems that made her famous. Released on June 12, it leans away from the punchy pop-punk of Guts and toward softer 1980s pop and New Wave textures, while still keeping the emotional bite that has defined her rise.

The new record frames love from inside the relationship, not only after it falls apart. NPR described the album as an attempt to trace the life cycle of Rodrigo’s first “real, big girl” relationship, a choice that gives the songs a different kind of tension: less revenge, more hindsight, and more uncertainty about what it means to sound grown up without sanding off the anger that built her audience.

Rodrigo has said the album was “a time capsule of a relationship in a few years of my life,” a phrase that fits the project’s central gamble. One song, “Purple,” changed late in the process after her split from English actor Louis Partridge, with Rodrigo saying she rewrote it from a “sweet and saccharine” love song into one where “things start to sour and unravel.” That revision makes the record feel less like a clean reinvention than a document of change happening in real time.

Coverage has placed Rodrigo and Partridge together from October 2023, when they were first spotted in London, until late 2025, or December last year. That timeline matters because it helps explain the album’s tonal split: the songs are shaped by romance, but also by the instability that enters when a private relationship becomes public material. The result is an album that sounds more polished than Guts, yet no less personal.

The collaboration that most clearly widens Rodrigo’s frame is “what’s wrong with me,” a duet with Robert Smith of The Cure. Smith’s presence adds a direct line to the darker pop-rock lineage Rodrigo is now drawing from, giving the album a kind of generational anchor as she moves from teenage fury toward a more complicated adult voice. The record suggests that Rodrigo is not abandoning the sharpness that made her a star. She is testing whether it can survive a little more light.