You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love Review

Two albums in, the model was clear: a furious lead single, a couple of piano ballads, and a run of very good lines about somebody who deserved them. This one dismantles that. Rodrigo and Nigro have gone looking for guitars with reverb on them, and the record moves through new wave, dream pop and stretches of straight pop rock without ever sounding like a costume change. Critics have converged on the same reading, that this is her most adventurous and most complete album, and that the growth is in the writing rather than the volume.

She is describing a relationship from the inside now, which is harder than describing a wound, and the specificity survives the move. The Cure is the strongest thing she has recorded, and reviewers singled it out on release. The counterargument, made by a minority, is that the first half leans on one register of heartbreak and repeats itself before the album finds its second gear, and that objection holds. But the back half is remarkable, the sequencing earns the length, and at twenty three she is writing with a control most of her peers never get near.