Olivia Rodrigo's Goth Transformation: How Robert Smith Became Her Dark Muse

When a relationship ends mid-album, sometimes the best thing that can happen is a 67-year-old goth legend stepping in to rescue your creative vision. That’s essentially what Robert Smith did for Olivia Rodrigo on her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, released Friday morning.

Rodrigo, arguably the biggest twentysomething pop star today, has built her career on the confessional, personal storytelling mode perfected by Taylor Swift. But on this new project, she’s waging a deliberate stylistic battle against that influence—and the Cure’s lead singer is her unlikely secret weapon. Smith duets with Rodrigo on the track“What’s Wrong With Me,”contributes his signature six-string bass, and serves as the sonic inspiration threaded throughout the album’s 13 tracks. The two premiered the song live last week at Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, and Rodrigo gushed about the collaboration, calling Smith perhaps the best songwriter to come out of England when they performed together at Glastonbury last summer.

The full-circle moment hits differently when you learn that Rodrigo’s father has seen the Cure about 30 times. When she introduced him to Smith, her dad was in tears and now uses a photo of them together as his phone’s screen saver. It’s the kind of personal touch that explains why this collaboration feels genuine rather than gimmicky—Rodrigo isn’t just name-dropping a cool influence; she’s honoring a formative part of her own family history while using Smith’s darker, more complex approach to songwriting to deepen her own work.

The album’s evolution toward the gothic makes sense given what happened during recording. A relationship with a British actor broke up somewhere in the middle of the writing process, forcing Rodrigo and her longtime producer Dan Nigro to revisit the love songs and inject them with something more honest, sad, and creepy. That creative challenge pushed her away from the sparkly, taffeta-and-cardigans territory she might have occupied and toward Smith’s territory of fear, yearning, and morbid beauty.

The tension between Swift’s influence and Smith’s darker pull creates the album’s most interesting dynamic. References to“Just Like Heaven”appear directly in the opening track“Drop Dead,”while the second single bears the title“The Cure”itself—a clever double meaning that works both as the thing that heals what ails you and as a wink to the band itself. Even when Smith isn’t explicitly named, his sonic fingerprints are scattered across the record: reverb-heavy guitar work, beatbox rhythms, and a willingness to embrace weirdness and self-aware humor in service of genuine emotion.

What makes this collaboration matter beyond the novelty is what it signals about where young women songwriters are turning for inspiration. Rodrigo joins a cohort that includes Phoebe Bridgers and the supergroup Boygenius in mining the Cure’s catalog for material that speaks to interrogating toxic masculinity and the givens of gender identity. Smith’s“Boys Don’t Cry”blazed trails defying machismo decades ago, and his willingness to wear lipstick and eyeliner while remaining happily married since 1988 offers a different model of masculine self-expression than the pop world typically celebrates. For artists examining their own identities and relationships, that matters. You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love isn’t just a breakup album riding the coattails of a famous producer—it’s a statement about whose influence matters when you’re trying to say something true.