I’ve spent the past couple of months digging into the past, so I figured I’d spend this week catching up on some of this year’s releases.

First up is the best new album I’ve heard in a long time, Olivia Rodrigo’s third studio release You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. I’m a fan of the 23-year-old Rodrigo’s first two albums — 2021’s Sour and 2023’s Guts — but I consider this one easily her best yet.

The album belongs to the storied tradition of great break-up albums, but it comes at it from an interesting angle. It’s basically a concept album spanning a relationship, with the songs moving from infatuation through disenchantment and ultimately heartbreak.

Rodrigo cleverly plants the seeds of the relationship’s fate even in the early songs. Opening track ‘Drop Dead’ is an unabashed love song, but on its follow-up, ‘Stupid Song,’ Rodrigo sings the line “they say that honest love is a cage that makes you feel free” before offering up a laundry list of metaphors for how happy she is. Third track ‘Honeybee’ finds her so besotted that she can’t stop fearing the worst.

The worm turns in the brilliant ‘Purple,’ where buying matching toothbrushes is listed alongside fighting “over who I’m hanging out with” as signs of true coupledom. She describes her “red” and his “blue” as blending to combine a comforting purple. But in the song’s final lines, that purple turns to black.

Standout single ‘The Cure’ kicks off the album’s second side (cheers to Rodrigo for thinking in terms of sides!) and finds her realizing that she was counting on this love affair to solve problems within herself that have nothing to do with it. On the remaining songs, the dissolution of the relationship is framed through that lens — an effort to better understand herself.

You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is a nifty bit of thematic songwriting, but it’s also a sonic blast. Rodrigo is playing in an 80s New Wave sandbox on a lot of these tracks, and I absolutely love the results. Elsewhere, she has a fondness for plaintive piano ballads and Elliott Smith melancholy, also right up my alley. She has impeccable taste and a knack for spinning her influences into sharp, original work.