NEW YORK – Olivia Rodrigo was the first breakthrough pop star of this decade, a one-time Disney Channel star who set a fresh template for specific, confessional songwriting on a mass scale.

On billion-stream smashes like Drivers License (2021) and Good 4 U (2021), the American singer-actress, now 23, built a career on the back of two complementary musical impulses: exasperated power balladry and exasperated pop-punk.

On her first two albums, Sour (2021) and Guts (2023), her songs had targets; the fury she channelled nailed a frequency that activated a legion of young female fans.

Now on the other side of what she calls her first “big-girl relationship”, her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, out on June 12, takes a step back and then zooms in.

Across 13 songs, she assesses an ultimately doomed relationship from beginning to break-up in real-time detail: the raw thrill of a new connection (Drop Dead, which debuted at No. 1), the abandon of falling hard (Stupid Song, U + Me = <3), the unexplained itches (Maggots For Brains, My Way), the stomach-churning realisations (Begged), and the acceptance of the end (Cigarette Smoke).

Initially, she had hoped to write about newfound contentment in a way that was not dull. “That was a daunting task for me,” she told Popcast, The New York Times’ pop culture show, in her first in-depth interview about the album. As “someone who was very known for writing break-up songs and being angry and sad”, she said, “I wanted to prove to myself that I didn’t have to be miserable to write a song that I liked.”

About halfway through the album-writing process, her personal story took a turn. Working for a third straight LP with Dan Nigro, a producer and songwriting collaborator, she went back to tinker and tell a more true story.

“After writing break-up songs,” she said, “we had the fun challenge of going back and actually tweaking some of the love songs on the record and making them a little more honest and more sad and creepy.”