Disney star Olivia Rodrigo breaks records with debut album

Unknown to the general public a few months ago, the young Disney star, Olivia Rodrigo today dominates the music charts with her first album. sour released May 21. Barely 18 years old, the teenager is breaking records.

With more than 295,000 sales Olivia Rodrigo signs the best start of the year 2021 and ranks first on the Billboard 200. The last woman to reach this position with a first opus is the rapper Cardi B in 2018. Across the Channel, the young woman became the youngest solo artist to be at the same time at the top of the charts for singles and albums.

A love triangle made in Disney

In January, she was already shaking up the international charts with her single drivers license, breaking the record for the number of daily streams on Spotify – excluding Christmas songs.

In this title Olivia confides in her breakup. She evokes a boy who would have written a song for her and a young blonde woman older than her for whom the latter would have left her. A classic love triangle story that has gone viral on social media and in particular on TikTok.

Thanks to his role as Nini in High School Musical: The Musical Series broadcast on Disney +, Olivia had a solid fan base at the time of the release of her single. This audience then tried to guess the identity of the protagonists of the song. Would it be question of the actor Joshua Basset, with whom the young woman shared the poster, and Sabrina Carpenter, former actress of Disney Channel? Shortly after, the two actor actors released singles “answers” to drivers license which had the effect of relaunching melodrama on the Internet.

Adolescent discomfort

Powered but not marred by all the stories that surrounded its release, Olivia Rodrigo’s debut single was well received by critics. The teenager has been compared to Lorde and Taylor Swift, of whom she has never hidden being a big fan. Like with drivers license, the singer knew how to transmit on her first album sour, the emotions that run through any Generation Z teenager, from the heartaches to the violence of those young years.

From the opening title brutal, Olivia sets the tone: “And I’m so sick of seventeen / Where’s my fucking teenage dream? / If someone tells me one more time / “Enjoy your youth”, I’m gonna cry ” ( “And I’m sick of my seventeen / Where’s my fucking teenage dream? / If someone says to me again / ‘Enjoy your youth’ I’m gonna cry” ).

Since childhood, Generation Z has been rocked by a pop culture that romances adolescence. So, when at the long-awaited age one is tormented by lack of self-confidence, complexes, anxiety and fear of the future, the fall is great. “I can’t even parallel park” ( “I don’t even know how to niche” ), she quips on brutal with reference to drivers license.

The return of pop-punk

The eleven track album mixes influences. We can naturally guess that of Taylor Swift, both in the writing and in the melodies – 1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back sample the song New Year’s Day – but also more rock references. The titles, brutal, good 4 u, and in a lesser extent jealousy, jealousy, contrast with the strolls that make up the rest of the album by grungy guitar riffs and distortions. This rock side, more raw, Olivia got it from her mother, a big fan of punk and metal. These sounds find their echo in the return of the “punk” which operates in pop music.

Still on TikTok, the social network that saw it take off, the pop-punk subculture is experiencing a second wind. Groups like tATu, Panic! At The Disco, Avril Lavigne, or Paramore are viral. It is therefore not surprising that the single good 4 u totals to date 1.3 million videos on the social network. With sour, Olivia Rodrigo has not only been able to transcribe the evils that haunt young people of her age, she has been able to capture and insert into her music and her aestheticism the nostalgia for the years 1990-2000 that lives in her generation.