You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love      Artist: Olivia RodrigoLabel: GeffenOlivia Rodrigo first indicated she was about to go indie last summer, when she covered Fontaines DC in Dublin and duetted with Robert Smith, of The Cure, at Glastonbury. Just so nobody missed the point, she went on to pay tribute to The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt – indiest entity in the known cosmos – when she recorded a version of Merritt’s Book of Love (“a masterpiece”) for a charity record.These were unusual departures for an artist whose chronicling of teenage heartache on Drivers License had made her one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. But Rodrigo’s passion for the janglingly vulnerable outsider music of the 1980s and 1990s has turned out to be more than a passing fad. That point is driven home by her brilliantly catchy and beautifully bittersweet third LP, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, which vindicates her willingness to go out on a limb and take inspiration from alternative pop’s most woebegone weirdos and wunderkinds.Her gearshift away from the bubblegum sound of her previous LP was hinted at on the record’s lead single, Drop Dead. Opening the record on a note of wintry minimalism, it sets the tone for much of what is to follow across the ensuing 12 tracks. But You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is not a one-note affair, and Rodrigo’s influences run deep. Stupid Song is a gothic banger with shades of Lorde; Honeybee buzzes around early Billie Eilish, with its dolorous piano and a vocal that tiptoes into the sort of breathy, ASMR-esque style that is an Eilish trademark.Drop Dead aside, the first real surprise arrives with Maggots for Brains, which bounces along on a Factory Records bassline. Think Joy Division or Section 25 – not a sentence you’d ever expect to write about Rodrigo when she released Drivers License, at the start of 2021.It has the spring-heeled energy of a great indie banger. Giddy with gloom, the tune is elevated by Rodrigo’s ability to make something as mundane as a break-up feel like a body-horror movie set to a beat (“I’m a zombie in my body / I’m a train off the track”).The retro melancholy intensifies on the darkly rolling U + Me = <3, which taps into the indie boom and artists such as Snail Mail and Alvvays. But if the music represents something new, thematically the record orbits familiar Rodrigo themes.These include the exquisite pain of loving and losing and how a break-up can be both devastating and character-forming. As has been widely reported, the subject of many of the songs is seemingly her on-off partner, the English actor Louis Partridge, with whom she has reportedly recently reconciled, so more drama may be to follow.A pop star getting down in the trenches of guitar rock could be a recipe for calamity. Nobody needs to hear their favourite hit purveyor living out their wildest Morrissey fantasies. But Rodrigo’s passion for scuzzy underdog pop feels authentic. That’s particularly true of her Robert Smith collaboration What’s Wrong with Me, a dulcet dirge where Smith generously takes a back seat and chimes in with anguished backing vocals.Were it any other artist, a Cure collaboration would be positioned as the project’s centrepiece. But Rodrigo isn’t done: she unleashes a final surprise with the vivacious Expectations, a brash, breezy new-wave number that a draws on The Go-Go’s and Avril Lavigne and dance-floor-primed Madonna.At the age of just 23, and on her third album, Rodrigo is taking a risk by wearing so many influences on her sleeve. There’s the obvious danger of slipping into pastiche and sounding as if she has spent a lost night at new-wave karaoke. But this irresistible LP does more than namecheck the ghosts of indie rock past. Rodrigo makes them feel alive and invests them with the bubblegum spirit of the best pop. It’s an indie record for the whole world – and her best album yet.