Three years ago, I found myself on a subway car packed with teenage girls who were on their way to an Olivia Rodrigo concert. To say that I felt old in this moment would not do it justice; to say that I felt like a giant, ancient aardvark who had ended up on public transit after accidentally escaping my enclosure in the Living Fossils exhibit at the zoo would still fall short, but close enough.
They were incredible, these girls. They were all wearing purple, all screaming and gasping and singing; they all had, as far as I could tell, about 17 legs apiece. When the subway doors opened, they poured out and roared away into the night, an undulating wave of miniskirts and glitter that consumed everything in its path.
All of which is to say, Olivia Rodrigo is an artist, and a phenomenon, for which I am most decidedly not the target audience. That also goes for her newest album, released on Friday; I was completely unaware of the massive buzz surrounding it until I searched Rodrigo’s name on Google last week and discovered a countdown clock and a bunch of dancing heart and flower emojis at the top of the results—which I assume mean something to the miniskirted legions; as an aardvark, I have no idea.
But I listen to her music anyway. Partly out of sheer enjoyment—her songs hit the same propulsive sweet spot, sound-wise, as the pop punk anthems of Veruca Salt, No Doubt, and Elastica that I thrashed around to in my own youth—but also because I believe she might be Gen Z’s greatest documentarian. Not just an artist but a scribe, who captures the experience of being alive and young in America in a way that both makes people of her own generation feel seen and also makes their experiences legible to other people, older people. People who know the feeling of being 22, but not how it feels to feel it in 2026.
