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The 50 best albums of 2021, No 8: Olivia Rodrigo – Sour
The 18-year-old's wildly successful debut may show its influences very plainly, but its anxious, barbed emotions announce a new and singular talentMore on the best culture of 2021"Who is Olivia Rodrigo?" At the start of this year, that question would have resulted in a shrug from most people over the age of 20. But by the second week of January, after releasing the lovelorn power ballad Drivers License, she was pop's shiniest new star. Not since Britney Spears shimmied her way down a hallway dressed in school uniform has a debut single had such an immediate cultural impact: within four days, the song broke Spotify's record for the most single-day streams for a non-holiday song – days later, Rodrigo broke her own record – and it would spend nine consecutive weeks at No 1 on the UK charts.
Like Spears, Rodrigo also got her start with Disney, notably in the television spin-off of High School Musical. However, Rodrigo's pathway to pop dominance wasn't built on dance routines and Max Martin-penned bangers but with Sour, her intimate, barbed, anxious and brilliantly crafted debut album about the butchery of heartbreak and the emotional Hurricane that is being a teenager. As she utters at the very beginning of its first song, Brutal: "I want it to be, like, messy."
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