Review: Olivia Rodrigo leads a new generation to the loud stuff

Heartbreak is a fickle thing. It can sound like a quiet hum one minute, and the next it can thrash in your mind like a wall of distortion. On a Monday night in Toronto, Olivia Rodrigo played both like she’s been waiting her whole life to. Though she was primed to be a pop star, her instincts are grittier, and on the latest stop of her Unraveled tour, she argues that the line between pop and alt-rock has always been thin.

In two hours, Rodrigo delivered a powerful 24-song set, including older fan favorites like “good 4 u,” “favorite crime,” and “vampire,” alongside the majority of her songs from her latest album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. The pop-punk brat of the Guts era hasn’t vanished, but she’s grown a garden around her. The production is set over seasons to mirror falling in love — and the subsequent dissolution of it — over a full year, beginning in spring and concluding in a pseudo-encore dubbed spring II. 

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On the massive half-moon screen, she lied in a field of flowers while birdsong and insects filled the arena before she stepped onstage. It’s a stark contrast to the rock bravado she exuded on her previous tours, but it makes sense: She’s a bit older, a bit wiser, and has the mended heart to prove it. “There was a time when I thought you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love was going to be all love songs,” she says with a knowing laugh. “We know how that ended.”

As the show moved through its seasons, the room became a choir on “deja vu” before cutting the tension with something fast and furious, like the guttural punch of “all-american bitch,” and the whole place went off. It’s the same catharsis I felt at My Chemical Romance’s anniversary tour for The Black Parade in 2025. Her sets work like the best emo and punk records, where melodrama and heartbreak are the throughlines and the chorus belongs to the artist as much as it does to the audience.

While watching Rodrigo, I kept thinking of an overused Tumblr line: “You are a mosaic of everyone you’ve ever loved.” She’s never been quiet about her influences, and they’re far from subtle in her music: Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Hole, Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, and the like. The openers for this tour share a kindred spirit: Devon Again, the Last Dinner Party, and Wolf Alice, who set the tone for the Toronto show with an eclectic mix of tracks from their discography, with vocalist Ellie Rowsell making a pop-star crowd feel like it had wandered into a sweaty club show.

There’s an old, boring concept where you have to look, dress, or act a certain way to be declared “alternative.” You must adhere to labels and place yourself into boxes that you fit perfectly inside. It’s thrilling to watch Rodrigo challenge that idea. What’s more alternative than asking an audience just shy of 20,000 people, most of them women under 18, to “think of something or someone that makes you really angry” and scream as loud as you can as a release? What’s more alternative than starting your own modern-day version of Lilith Fair? It’s clear from her music, charity efforts, and collaborations with artists like Robert Smith of the Cure that she’s always been more left of center.

At first glance, Rodrigo seemingly traded the pit for the garden, but the people in it, from the tweens in babydoll dresses and smudged eyeliner to their moms in merch from tours past, are still the scene’s future. The route into the genre might not be a basement show or a record store anymore, but Rodrigo is making sure the next generation still finds its way to the loud stuff.

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