Olivia Rodrigo will never settle for being just another main pop girl. She demands to be your perfect all-American rock star. O-Rod has claimed her crown as the truest, realest, most shameless rock & roller of our moment. “There’s something so special about rock music made by women,” she said in December, in her conversation with Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame podcast. “There’s a different emotional quality to it. The pain and rage and vulnerability that a woman can express through a rock song is an entirely different category. Growing up, I was so inspired by that.”
This former Disney princess has always reveled in her rock moves, ever since her first tour in 2022, when she was covering Veruca Salt and Avril Lavigne. Early on, she joined No Doubt and Sheryl Crow onstage. But she takes special pride in celebrating the Nineties feminist-punk explosion — and claiming her place in it. This is the girl who told Rolling Stone her mom used to wake her up every morning by playing the 1990s grunge queens Babes in Toyland. (“Vomit Heart” walked so “Drivers License” could run?)
Last year was Rodrigo’s festival era, rampaging around the world with her lethal all-female band. She cranked up her fiercest arena-slaying bravado, belting “All-American Bitch” as the bloodthirsty rock & roll animal she was always meant to be. She dropped to her knees to worship the guitar heroes in her band, Daisy Spencer and Arianna Powell. She sang duets with her idols, from Weezer to David Byrne. Best of all, she shared the stage with the Cure’s Robert Smith at Glastonbury, calling him “the greatest songwriter to come out of England.”
But she’s always given it up to her rock inspirations. In June, when she made her surprise appearance at the Primavera Festival in Barcelona, she shocked the crowd by bringing out Robert Smith himself, who joined her to debut their then-unreleased duet “What’s Wrong With Me.” She sang her Number One hit “Drop Dead,” with the line “You know all the words to ‘Just Like Heaven,’ and I know why he wrote them” — then she sang a duet with the man who wrote them.
Rodrigo obviously wasn’t kidding when she kept saying how her new tunes were inspired by goth bands like the Cure and Joy Division. You can hear that all over her blockbuster album You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. She digs deep into Eighties and Nineties rock sounds: the synth buzz of “Maggots for Brains,” the electro-punk aggro of “My Way,” the post-punk guitar jangle of “U + Me = <3.” “The Cure” might be her greatest song yet, simmering in the 1990s mode of Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair. This summer, she joined the Pumpkins at Lollapalooza, singing the Mellon Collie banger “Thirty Three and a Third,” shortly before she was seen rocking out at a My Chemical Romance show.
She has made a bold statement with her Daisy Chain Fields festival, a wildly ambitious celebration of women in music, reaching back to legends like Stevie Nicks from the 1970s; Garbage, Bikini Kill, and the Breeders from the 1990s; and Karen O from the 2000s. The slate reached from Doechii to Katseye to Mitski, not to mention her old doughnut-shop friend Chappell Roan. It’s fitting that she sang a triumphant duet with Sarah McLachlan, since she’s upholding the spirit of the pioneering Lilith Fair.
She keeps showing off her wide-ranging sense of rock history, with her producer-collaborator Dan Nigro, who came out of the Long Island emo scene with his band As Tall As Lions. (She’s said he suggested her joke on the album about her “yacht-rock music taste.”) Rodrigo’s unfiltered rockness is an achievement to celebrate. May she stay this unrelentlessly upset forever.
This story is part of our Reasons to Love Rock series, with all the sounds, trends, scenes, and artists that have us excited about rock music in 2026.
