POP/ROCK

Olivia Rodrigo, "Sour" (Geffen)

For the past few months, Rodrigo has been chiseling out a story about young love turned sour. Between the undulating ballad "Drivers License" — No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks — and the wistfully aggrieved (and perhaps even better) "Deja Vu," she's nailed the agony of collapse, and the anxiety of watching your old partner rebuild. It's a phenomenon as awful as it is familiar.

Like those songs, "Enough for You" — from her nuanced and often exceptional debut album — seems like it's about the contest between the narrator and the woman who replaced her in her ex's eyes and arms. But really it's about a different sort of competition: the one between the versions of the self we cycle through, depending on who's around.

On "Sour," which deploys sweet pop and tart punk equally well, Rodrigo's real study is of the unsteady self, the way in which young people contort themselves into the shapes laid out before them. It is about the wages of being clay, not the mold.

For Rodrigo, 18, who's been playing alternate versions of herself in public at least as far back as the first season of the Disney Channel's "Bizaardvark," in 2016, it is a natural subject. She is an optimal pop star for the era of trying on new identities and discarding as you go. "Sour" is an album about accepting alternate endings, and embracing who you become when you have to hot swap one idea about yourself for another all while keeping up a smile, or a career, or several.

Rodrigo's juggle is also embedded in her musical choices on "Sour," which is written almost wholly by her. There are more polished songs like the singles and the rousing, Paramore-esque "Good 4 U" jostling with rawer ones like "Enough for You" and "Jealousy, Jealousy."

"Traitor," one of the highlights, is a stark song masquerading as a bombastic one. That songwriting flourish is emblematic of what Rodrigo has learned from Taylor Swift on this album: nailing the precise language for an imprecise, complex emotional situation; and working through private stories in public fashion.

jon caramanica, New York Times

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