From High School Musical: The Musical: The Series to 750 million views on YouTube.
The 18-year-old singer Olivia Rodrigo published this Friday Sour , a debut album that comes preceded by the immense success of the song Driver’s License , which in just five months exceeded 750 million views on Spotify .
Since the song broke records on all streaming platforms , Rodrigo’s rise to fame continues at a dizzying pace that placed her at the level of phenomena like Billie Eilish or Rosalía , with just a couple of songs on the market.
In 2020, the American starred in a Disney Channel series , High School Musical: The Musical: The Series , when she began posting videos of her own piano compositions on her Instagram profile .
One of them attracted enough attention that the Interscope label , which launched Lana del Rey’s career ten years ago after a YouTube clip , decided to promote the cut commercially.
With a simple D letter about a love breakup in the suburbs of the United States, the song garnered more than 21 million views in its first three days.
“I got my driver’s license last week / as we always talk / because you were so excited for me / to finally drive home / but today I drove through the suburbs / crying because you weren’t around,” says the hit behind the wheel.
A stage called Tik-Tok
The ballad went viral on the TikTok platform and positioned Rodrigo as the most listened to artist in the Anglo-Saxon world , ahead of Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and The Weekend.
“Few people on Earth can know how Olivia Rodrigo is feeling at this moment; even by today’s standards of viral fame, her rise has been sudden, exceptional,” notes Pitchfork magazine in her criticism .
Oceans of ink were written in the press analyzing this phenomenon that surprised the music industry. By comparison, Peaches, the last single consolidated as a star Justin Bieber, adds 400 million plays on Spotify, far from the more than 750 Driver’s License.
After the immense success, Rodrigo announced that he was preparing her debut album in order to show that he knew how to write “songs that go beyond the piano ballad.”
The 11 songs that make up Sour are an amalgam of genres and rhythms with a common denominator: simple lyrics about adolescence and heartbreak.
“I’m so sick of seventeen / Where’s my damn teenage dream? / If someone tells me one more time ‘enjoy your youth’, I’m going to cry,” he kicks on the Brutal guitar player .
Rodrigo also masters acoustic sound in Enough For You and approaches grunge in Good 4 U and psychedelic in Deja Vu . With those last two songs, she became the first artist in history to put all her debut singles among the 10 most listened to songs on the US charts.
The Los Angeles Times considers Sour to be “the most conscious pop album of recent times” and an “impeccable” display of music for Gen Z , those born after 1996.
There are also those who say that Olivia Rodrigo’s album is like listening to the audiobook of a “puberta” crying for her first boyfriend.
Rolling Stone , meanwhile, highlights the influence of Taylor Swift in the composition, whom Rodrigo cites in the album credits
At 31, Swift is the only singer to win three Grammy Awards for best album of the year. Rodrigo, with her first album, points as one of the favorites to win recognition for the best debut in the next awards. We will see, we will see …