Proust called love reciprocal torture, Bukowski said it was stranger than grass on fire, and Olivia Rodrigo admitted it was fucking embarrassing. Yet on “Drop Dead,” the opening cut from her new album, here she is in free fall, heart on her sleeve, ready to risk everything as hope and possibility flicker over a magical night — poets, philosophers, and past lessons be damned. The song is a pure dopamine rush, built on heart-thudding percussion and glowing synths, the thrill of romance and anticipation ramping up with each euphoric line: “Kiss me, and I might drop dead.”
This could well be the giddiest we’ve ever heard Rodrigo, who wasn’t afraid to pack her blockbuster albums Sour and Guts with punky, pissed-off energy and wildly relatable, angst-filled anthems. For her third release, it might have seemed like she was ready for a simpler, googly-eyed lover-girl era — except, come on, we all know she’s too witty, too self-aware, and just too talented a songwriter to go with rose-colored confessions about a new relationship.
The title was one clue: You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love makes it clear that this project is a complex emotional ride, one that’ll turn platitudes and presumptions about love on their head. There were sonic Easter eggs dotting “Drop Dead,” which was also the first single, like a reference to the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” and the hazy fuzz of guitars that she and longtime producer Dan Nigro went for, conjuring New Wave gods and the image of a lonely-hearted Robert Smith (more on him in a bit). All of it sets up something closer to real life as Rodrigo moves through the full arc of a relationship — the dreamy honeymoon phase, the first hints of conflict, the crushing goodbye — to achieve her most complete, musically adventurous album yet.
First, though, fireworks. The initial songs capture that feeling of falling in real time (Rodrigo has said the album is about her first “adult” relationship; many fans think she’s referring to actor Louis Partridge, whom she dated for more than a year). She’s still on a high on “Stupid Song,” a track that seems like a blissful ballad before saturated Eighties chords pipe in. “Honeybee” is a sleepier cut that dips the energy that’s been rising, but it does serve as a tender moment that establishes the deep extent of her emotions. But then anxieties start build — and if there’s something Rodrigo does well, it’s dive into her insecurities with a mix of humor and honesty. There’s a mopey synth party on “Maggots 4 Brains,” a snapshot of the yearning and neediness that takes over when there’s distance from the person she loves: “Everything feels moldy like the fruit that’s in my fridge/And everything that’s funny I wish I could tell to him.” The seams come apart a little more with each track, a testament to how perfectly she and Nigro sequenced the project, capturing the downward spiral of the relationship.
She’s blindly hopeful on “U + Me = <3,” and fully territorial on “My Way.” But the breaking point might be the stunning “Purple,” where she realizes the love she’s found also means she’s losing herself. The balladry of “The Cure” and “Begged” keep her turning the lens inward, though they threaten the momentum of the album. And if she needed to clarify her feelings more, help arrives on “What’s Wrong With Me,” when she’s joined by the Cure frontman himself. It’s a brilliant cameo; he’s been lurking everywhere on the album — nodded to constantly in the production and the lyrics — and finally he floats in, no longer an apparition but a guiding force. “I think you’re what’s wrong with me,” they sing in a line that suits both their discographies.
Rodrigo has always proudly displayed her references, drawing from Nineties rock and riot grrrl bands like Hole and Babes in Toyland on past collections, but here, she’s doing more than paying homage; she’s woven a sonic tapestry that any of her icons can fit into. Fans craving more aggressive, pop-punk energy might have trouble getting into the new sound at first, but Smith’s appearance is a testament to just how well it works. The electro-funhouse twitchiness of “Expectations,” which feels like it sprouted from a seed planted by the B-52s, adds another layer, keeping the listener on their toes.
A major strength of the album is how much Rodrigo’s storytelling has matured. For a girl who went stratospheric belting about teenage heartbreak on “Drivers License” at 17, there’s new wisdom as she comes to the brutal realization that you can adore someone more than anything and still have to let them go. She lands so many gutting lines: “If loving me means letting go and wishing me the best, then I guess I wish, I wish, I wish you loved me less,” she sings on “Less.” By the last track, “Cigarette Smoke,” she’s found a kind of peace — if not a full resolution quite yet — as she tries to move on. “The memories turn dark,” she repeats, over and over. Maybe they eventually fade, but the songs stay with you.
A past show produced by The Concert Production for Sidhu Moose Wala.
The Concert Production founders Sohail Mansuri and Zeeshan Siddiqui. Photos: Courtesy of The Concert Production
Linda Ramone and John Travolta Sean Sabhasaigh/Getty Images
Drake onstage in Toronto last year
Everybody Likes Drake Again. That Means We’re Healing
Not to be dramatic or anything, but not too long ago, listening to people talk about Drake, you’d think he would never top the charts again. But here we are: With Iceman, he’s broken his own record, earning a 13th week atop Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart on Sept. 5, surpassing Take Care’s 12-week run more than a decade ago. The achievement comes after the great rap civil war of 2024, which was framed as everything from a referendum on Drake’s character as a human being to a cleansing of what popular radio host Ebro would describe, in February 2025, as “a sickness in the game.”
Again, not trying to be dramatic, but even if you were skeptical of the discourse circa 2024, it is a bit shocking to hear the public’s recent re-embrace of Drake. Consider how far the frenzy around the most salacious allegations on Kendrick Lamar‘s “Not Like Us” extended. There was Christopher Alvarez, a disabled journalist, being dragged into conspiracy theories. There was the woman from the resurfaced concert footage, now 31, having to publicly dispute the creepy significance strangers had assigned to an onstage kiss from when she was 17. Drake said in his lawsuit against UMG that the threats had forced him to pull his seven-year-old son out of school.
What now feels like the absurdity of the moment registered as something deathly serious at the time. By September 2024, Lamar was releasing the ominous “Watch the Party Die,” just days after his Super Bowl halftime performance was announced. Oh, also, a major talking point in American culture a year and a half ago was whether one of the biggest superstars in the world would be publicly branded a pedophile during the Super Bowl.
In what world would any celebrity recover from that?
Except, with time, the online frenzy surrounding the Drake and Lamar feud reads more like a mass-psychosis event than a cultural reckoning. The music, oddly enough, often seemed secondary to the certainty of everyone discussing it. “Not Like Us” was a veritable hit, absolutely. But its cultural dominance became bound up in a widespread vilification of Drake that curdled online, where the most damning interpretation of anything could quickly become the accepted one. For a while, even putting on a Drake song could feel like something you had to explain, as if listening amounted to taking a position on the allegations.
That this all happened in 2024 is meaningful. This was right in the peak of Elon Musk’s reconstruction of Twitter, privileging rage bait and engagement tactics that helped misinformation disseminate like fact. It was also the beginning of AI tools becoming sophisticated enough to produce convincing-sounding tracks. Even before Drake released his first response, “Push Ups,” AI-generated response tracks were circulating across social media. And so, in many ways, the well of public opinion was already poisoned.
Listeners’ recent embrace of Drake feels settled in a broader cultural shift brewing since 2024. The beef, in hindsight, feels like a dying vestige of whatever people want to call “Woke 1.0”: a particular faith that exposing the right person could amount to a cultural transformation. For a moment, defeating Drake seemed to promise something about the future of hip-hop, about who would belong in it and what it would tolerate.
There were obvious holes in the argument, namely who exactly these arbiters of culture were and why they were uniquely qualified to speak for the entirety of Black people, questions that Drake pokes at on “Ran to Atlanta” from Iceman. Still, these were never even supposed to be binding philosophical truths in the first place. To hear levelheaded commentators discuss it, this was all simply entertainment — two of the genre’s greats duking it out. Even one of the beef’s catalysts, Metro Boomin, echoed the sentiment, lamenting how online fans had turned the battle into something sinister. Hell, even Jay-Z said something similar before himself tossing a few jabs at Drizzy in a freestyle at the Roots Picnic this year. But the artists themselves supplied the allegations. The ability to raise those stakes and then retreat into “simply entertainment” was part of the dynamic, too.
Even so, how it all devolved into a pseudocultural reckoning says more about the environment fans exist in today than it does about either Drake or Lamar. In the years around the beef, shocking revelations about Diddy as well as the global elite’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have become folded into the background, alongside a sense that accountability remains selective. This atmosphere of collective powerlessness offers one explanation for the conspiratorial thinking at the heart of Lamar versus Drake. A frustration with an increasingly degraded world and dwindling resources to change it means outrage can mobilize an enormous number of people very quickly, with little holding them together once the moment passes.
The language of exploitation and cultural extraction gave the battle a purpose that seemed to extend well beyond either rapper. But even if you took the least charitable opinion imaginable of our Canadian hitmaker, what was supposed to happen after Drake was defeated? The industry whose supposed wickedness Drake allegedly embodied carried on selling the spectacle itself.
What everyone was caught up in was an appetite with a longer history than the social media platforms now feeding it. Lance Oppenheim’s new film, Primetime, returns to Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator, a television format that made public humiliation feel like a public service. The connection is in the experience offered to the audience. The viewer could enjoy the confrontation with the reassuring sense that watching served some larger good. Never mind if anything that was unfolding on screen amounted to justice.
In the historian Anton Jäger’s book-length essay Hyperpolitics, published earlier this year in English, he describes how the past decade’s surge of political feeling has coincided with a continuing withdrawal from communal life. More isolated digital environments can fuel extraordinary mobilization without the actual community organizations that might turn it into something tangible. Negating Drake, then, became a gesture in itself. A means of signaling a broader dissatisfaction with the direction of hip-hop culture. Where the problems extend to technology and the demoralizing margins of streaming music, for a while it felt good for people to just wrap it all up in one word: Drake.
But on Iceman, it’s hard to take the idea of Drake as an evil force within hip-hop very seriously, even as he himself makes an effort to lean into the role of the villain. Drake’s music is most potent when it’s aimed at the masses, even if he swears his nice-guy days are over. This is the Degrassi kid turned global superstar rivaling Taylor Swift, after all.
Now, with Fear of Missing Out, Drake’s cryptically announced project slated for release this week, we’ve entered a second kind of Drake Renaissance. However delusional it seems, there was a moment when it felt somehow wrong to play Drake. His return to the top of the charts suggests a good deal of people were eager to get back to listening.