A Southern California music festival featuring only women musicians and created by Olivia Rodrigo? That’s not such a bad idea.
Rodrigo, fresh off the release of her junior album, on Monday unveiled her Daisy Chain Fields music festival and the roster of all-women artists set to take over Irvine’s Great Park on Aug. 29. The lineup will include Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Katseye, Mitski, Doechii and special guests Karen O, Sarah McLachlan and Stevie Nicks.
The 23-year-old Grammy winner and vocal advocate for women’s rights said in her post that her dream festival has finally become a reality and that earnings from the spectacular will go to charities benefiting women and girls.
“The lineup is truly insane and full of my heroes and friends,” Rodrigo said in her announcement. “I firmly believe that joy, community, and music can be the drivers of meaningful change and I’m hopeful this festival will be just that.”
Artists Bikini Kill, Die Spitz, Eli, Garbage, Not for Radio, Quiet Light, Rachel Chinouriri, Santigold and the Breeders are also set to perform. Fans hoping to snag tickets can sign up for pre-sale access on the festival’s website.
Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields comes to Irvine a month before the former Disney Channel star kicks off her massive Unraveled tour, promoting her latest release “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.” She will take over Inglewood’s Intuit Dome for four nights in 2027: Jan. 12, 13, 16 and 17.
In his album review, Times pop music critic Mikael Wood writes that Rodrigo’s latest release sees the singer-songwriter approach romance and heartbreak with “new wisdom, drawing sophisticated conclusions about why people in love do the things they do (and don’t do the things they don’t).”
Olivia Rodrigo has officially begun her new era, and this time she invited her fans to experience it alongside her.
To celebrate the release of her latest album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” Rodrigo collaborated with American Express to re-create the set of her music video for “The Cure.” The pop-up event, which opened last Thursday and ran until Sunday at Mica Studios, featured props from the video, storyboards, exclusive merchandise and several photo ops for fans.
With a beating felt heart and lab beakers to pose with, the pop-up transformed an industrial studio space in the Arts District into a pastel-painted cardboard hospital. Ahead of the public opening, Rodrigo surprised a small group of AMEX cardholders and select fans.
“I have an album that’s coming out today in about one hour, which is crazy,” Rodrigo said, wearing a blue “Nurses Do It Better” baby tee. “I figured since we’re all here, maybe we should just listen to a few of them together? Would that be cool?”
A little over an hour before the album’s release, Rodrigo played four songs from the album as the room brewed with excitement. She began with “Maggots for Brains,” a song about being so infatuated you can’t focus when your partner is away. Although it was their first listen, the song’s catchy chorus already had fans dancing along.
Banner for Rodridgo’s pop-up event hands above Mica Studios
(American Express)
Rodrigo explained that her next song, “Purple,” paid homage to the aesthetics of her previous albums, “Guts” and “Sour.”
“Obviously, this is my first non-purple album, but I just had to shout out purple somehow,” Rodrigo joked. “This song started out as a love song and sort of devolved from there, so I’ll let you guys be the judge.”
Playing off the somber vibes of “Purple,” Rodrigo played “Less” next. The piano ballad follows the dissolution of a relationship as the couple grows apart.
“I’ve been going back and forth on what the saddest song on the record is, but I think this one might be it,” Rodrigo said.
In a room full of fans, the song struck an emotional chord with many of the listeners. To bring the mood back up, Rodrigo finished the night by playing her new single, “Stupid Song.”
“This next one is a happy one, and it actually has a music video that comes out tonight,” Rodrigo said. “I love this song so much. It’s basically about having such an intense crush on someone that it drives you totally f— insane. I feel like we’ve all been there at some point in our lives.”
Rodrigo was all smiles at her event celebrating her latest album steeped in heartbreak and romance.
(American Express)
After Rodrigo previewed her music, “The Cure” music video exhibition was opened up to the fans. The showcase ranged from interactive photo ops to gallery walls featuring behind-the-scenes photos from the video shoot and Rodrigo’s nurse costume on display. The video’s props, which were primarily designed using cardboard and felt, were displayed in glass cases for visitors to admire.
Dressed in fun fashion including light pink and polka-dot outfits, fans posed throughout the set, re-creating scenes from the music video as “The Cure” played overhead. Many had thrown on a piece of the Los Angeles-exclusive merchandise on sale at the pop-up, with shirts and hats reading “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl in Los Angeles.”
So while some fans teared up at her lyrics and others beamed with excitement, everyone was hyped to experience Rodrigo’s new album.
“I really hope you enjoy this little exhibition. It is so gorgeous, and I am so proud of it,” Rodrigo said. “Thank you guys for being here, and I really hope you love ‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love’ as much as I do.”
What to do after writing some of this century’s most devastating songs about the torment of breaking up? Write some of this century’s most devastating songs about the ecstasy of getting together.
With her first two albums — 2021’s Grammy-winning “Sour” and 2023’s triple-platinum “Guts” — Olivia Rodrigo proved herself to be perhaps the most gifted of the many chroniclers of Gen Z romance to emerge in Taylor Swift’s wake. She could convey the hot sting of betrayal, as in her smash debut single, “Drivers License”; she could channel the injustice of watching an ex somehow carry on, as in “Good 4 U”; she could deliver a sick burn like somebody handing out Halloween candy, as in “Get Him Back!” (Because it deserves remembering: “He had an ego and a temper and a wandering eye / He said he’s six-foot-two, and I’m like, ‘Dude, nice try.’”)
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Yet on her thrilling third LP, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” Rodrigo, 23, turns to the pleasure that comes before the pain — and, in a feat very few in pop music are ever able to pull off, ends up with a number of first-flush-of-love songs as potent as any breakup tune.
She opens the album with “Drop Dead,” in which she compares a guy in line for the bathroom at a bar to an “angel on the walls of Versailles” — an early sign of how high the emotional ceiling is here. In “Stupid Song” she cycles through a series of metaphors to describe her lovesickness — she’s a car without a brake, she’s a heart made of melting wax — before finding a simpler but infinitely more vivid way of getting her point across: “You should feel how I feel when somebody says your name.” (Chills.)
“Maggots for Brains” is a song about how useless she becomes “when my baby goes away,” and let’s just take a second to savor the fact that Rodrigo is putting that title into the world less than four years after she was still a working Disney kid. The album’s next tune, “U + Me = <3,” is its high point: a euphoric promise of devotion that sounds like Sixpence None the Richer reborn as a Midwestern emo band. It’s got two young lovers carving their names into car seat leather, and it’s got a girl trying to impress her boyfriend’s older sister with her cynical humor and her taste in yacht rock.
More important, it’s got these lines of pure poetry: “They say modern love’s a cruel endeavor / And to that I say, F— it, whatever.” Kurt Cobain would be proud.
Working with her longtime producer, Dan Nigro, Rodrigo has expanded her stylistic palette to accommodate these new emotions; “You Seem Pretty Sad” pulls in chiming folk-rock and synthed-up new wave and even has a gorgeous wine-bar piano ballad, “Less,” that might put the scare in Rodrigo’s pal Laufey.
The cover of Olivia Rodrigo’s new album.
(Geffen Records)
The album is structured to trace the arc of a relationship, which means that the second half dips into the heartbreak we’re used to getting from Rodrigo. But she’s writing about familiar scenarios with new wisdom, drawing sophisticated conclusions about why people in love do the things they do (and don’t do the things they don’t).
In “The Cure,” which rides a strummed acoustic-guitar pattern that strongly recalls Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm,” she realizes a boyfriend can’t fix what’s broken inside her; “Begged” examines the limits of one partner’s willingness to look past the failings of the other. After hearing these songs, the happier ones at the beginning of the album reveal bits of shadow that Rodrigo has built into them to presage what’s to come — to presage what always comes.
It’s fitting, then, that Robert Smith of the Cure — perhaps pop’s most jubilant gloommeister — hovers over this LP like a patron saint: nodded to in “The Cure,” of course, but also “Drop Dead,” where Rodrigo name-checks the Cure’s classic “Just Like Heaven.” Smith himself turns up in “What’s Wrong With Me” for a duet with Rodrigo in which the two learn to accept that love, in the end, might be what kills them.
“My head is spinning and my stomach is sick,” they sing, and neither sounds like they’d have it any other way.
Los Angeles’ music industry, in recent years, has generally supported progressive causes. But as the primaries for the city’s mayoral race and California‘s governorship wrapped up Tuesday, some music executives and performers have supported and donated large amounts to Spencer Pratt, the right-leaning activist and reality TV star running for mayor.
According to data from the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, Pratt’s supporters include two members of the record industry’s most powerful family who donated the maximum amount allowed by law.
Pratt is a registered Republican whose heated rhetoric about homeless “zombies” and AI-created advertisements have rankled progressives and delighted conservatives. He has received support from President Trump, who told reporters that “I’d like to see him do well. He’s a character. I don’t know him, I assume he probably supports me… I heard he’s a big MAGA person.”
In response, Pratt told TMZ that “Everybody wants me to succeed because L.A. is the most important city in the country. The only support I need is from moms that wanna feel safe in Los Angeles. I’m laser-focused on that.”
Universal Music Group is home to some of music’s most outspoken progressives, including Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish, whose brother and collaborator Finneas O’Connell donated $250 to the progressive mayoral candidate Nithya Raman on May 6.
Earlier this year, UMG’s chairman and chief executive Lucian Grainge presented Rodrigo with the company’s Universal Music Group x REVERB Amplifier Award, which advocates for “social and environmental nonprofit campaigns through the cultural power of music,” according to a release.
On May 9, Grainge (listed as a resident of Pacific Palisades, where Pratt lost his home in the 2025 fires) maxed out with an $1,800 donation to Pratt’s campaign, as previously reported in The Times. A representative for UMG did not immediately return a request for comment on Grainge’s donation.
He’s not the only Pratt donor in the family.
Grainge’s son Elliot ascended through the record industry with his 10k Projects label, and now heads UMG’s competitor Atlantic Records. Vocal progressives like Cardi B, the Marías and Charli XCX are some of the label’s most high-profile acts.
On May 8, Elliot Grainge also gave $1,800 to Pratt‘s campaign. A representative for Atlantic did not immediately return a request for comment.
Last month, the record producer and composing titan David Foster and his wife, singer Katharine McPhee, performed at a fundraiser for Pratt where they crooned a version of Tina Turner’s hit “The Best” to the mayoral hopeful. “Spencer, you’re simply the best. Better than all the rest. Better than Karen Bass and Nithya Raman,” McPhee sang.
At Warner Music, Gabz Landman, the senior vice president for A&R at Warner Chappell, its powerful music publishing wing, who has worked with Dua Lipa, Laufey and Amy Allen, gave $105.24 to Pratt on Feb. 4. Through a Warner Music representative, Landman said the donation was for merchandise given to a friend, and was not intended as support for Pratt’s campaign.
The superstar EDM producer and DJ Kaskade has left supportive messages on Pratt’s social media, commenting on one of the candidate’s posts that “At this point, who is buying in to Bass’s fairytale narrative?! I am still shocked she hasn’t resigned!” The DJ and producer Diplo also left a supportive comment — a prayer-hands emoji and “please” — on one of Pratt’s social media posts. Records do not show any personal donations to Pratt’s campaign from either artist.
Public records do not show any donations to Pratt’s campaign from live-industry executives atop firms like Live Nation, AEG or Goldenvoice.
Some are calling the controversy over Olivia Rodrigo’s recent outfit choices babydoll-dress-gate, Olivia Rodrigo calls it “weird.”
The dress debacle kicked up in early May when Rodrigo released the music video for “Drop Dead,” in which she runs through the Palace of Versailles wearing a pink-and-blue ruffled babydoll set while singing about the intensity of a crush. Then on May 8, she wore a cottage-core pink-and-white floral babydoll dress with knee-high Dr. Martens during a live performance in Barcelona.
Rodrigo was drawing from subversive feminist and punk fashion of yore, but internet critics were quick to slam the “deja vu” singer, saying the ensemble was sexualizing child-like imagery. In an hour-and-a-half interview with the New York Times Popcast that dropped on Thursday, Rodrigo staunchly defended the dress and called the criticism disturbing.
“I have worn outfits that are maybe revealing on stage, like I’ve been on stage in a sparkly bra and little shorts — which is my right — that’s fun,” she said. “I felt cool and comfortable in that, and that wasn’t inappropriate, but me fully covered up in a dress that people deemed to be, like, childlike was inappropriate, and I think it shows how we really normalize pedophilia in our culture.”
Rodrigo further decried the criticism as rhetoric that girls are fed from a young age, “which is ‘don’t wear that, because then a man is going to sexualize your body, and it’s your fault’ — it’s so weird.”
Rodrigo said she didn’t think she looked “sexy” in the babydoll dress; she was going for a cool look à la Kathleen Hannah or like Courtney Love, musicians whom the pop star said are her heroes. Love appeared to defend Rodrigo on social media by resharing posts defending the singer-songwriter in since-expired Instagram stories.
“I just think if we start dressing in a way that’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t want some f— freak to think that I am sexy like a baby’ or some crazy thing like that, I think it’s losing the plot a little bit,” she said. “I’m very protective of younger women and girls, and I don’t ever want them to be fed that rhetoric. You shouldn’t be responsible for some guy sexualizing you in a way that was never your intention.”
Rodrigo’s third studio album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” which features hit singles “Drop Dead” and “The Cure,” will be released June 12.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – AUGUST 01: Olivia Rodrigo performs during Lollapalooza at Grant Park on August 01, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Josh Brasted/FilmMagic)Credit: Getty
OLIVIA Rodrigo is set to embark on a huge world tour later this year.
She is releasing a new album in the summer, and to mark it, the superstar singer will be performing across the globe.
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What are Olivia Rodrigo’s UK tour dates?
To mark the release of her upcoming record, Rodrigo is going on a world tour that will span North America, Europe and the UK, with over 60 dates announced.
It is titled ‘The Unravelled Tour’ and will start in the US in September 2026.
The tour will start its UK leg in April 2027, with four nights at London’s O2 Arena the only dates announced so far in Britain. The dates announced for the London shows are:
Tickets for the tour go on general sale on Friday, May 7 at 12pm, and will be available on Ticketmaster here – but there are ways to grab tickets ahead of that date.
There are various presales in which you can secure your place at one of the gigs:
O2 presale – Tuesday May 5 at 10am. Only for O2 customers
Album presale – Tuesday May 5 at 12pm. This is for fans who preorder Olivia’s new album.
American Express presale – Tuesday May 5 at 12pm. For American Express card holders.
There will also be tickets available on secondary ticket websites, such as Viagogo here.
No prices have yet been confirmed for the tour, however for an idea of how much they could be, her 2024 GUTS tour ranged from around £65 to £200 for non-VIP tickets.
Cheaper “silver star” tickets will also be made available during the tour. In the US they’ll cost just $20, with the UK dates priced at ‘a local currency equivalent’.
These tickets will be made available at a later date.
When is Olivia Rodrigo’s new album released?
Olivia’s new album “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love” comes out on June 12.
So far, she has only released one track from her new record, a song called “Drop Dead”.
ADDISON Rae surprised music lovers at Coachella weekend two by bringing out Olivia Rodrigo to perform her new single Drop Dead.
The track came out on Friday, marking itself as the lead single off of Olivia’s much-anticipated third album “you look pretty sad for a girl so in love.”
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Addison Rae brought out Olivia Rodrigo as a surprise guest during Coachella weekend twoCredit: Coachella ReplayThey performed Olivia’s new single Drop Dead which came out on FridayCredit: Coachella Replay
The Diet Pepsi singer turned to the crowd and asked them if they had been listening to any new music during the week, before beginning to sing her 2025 single, Headphones On.
However, when Addison sung the lyrics “I compare myself to the new IT girl,” Olivia came out of nowhere and joined in the performance.
The moment was met with enormous cheers from the crowd, as no one expected a special guest to arrive.
But the roaring reception only got louder as the ladies launched into singing Drop Dead.
Olivia announced that she was releasing her third album earlier this month via a post to her Instagram channel.
In the post she shared a photo of the front cover, showing her with her eyes shut on a swing set.
In the caption she revealed the release date as June 12, sharing: “My third album ‘You seem pretty sad for a girl so in love’ is out June 12th.
“I am so proud of this record and I can’t wait for you to hear it.”
Drop Dead is the first new music to arrive from Olivia since September 2023 when she released her Sophomore album, GUTS.
It’s the lead track from Olivia’s upcoming third album, you look pretty sad for a girl so in loveCredit: Coachella Replay
GUTS achieved massive success with hits including Vampire and Bad Idea Right?
It followed the success of her debut album SOUR from 2021, adored for smash-hit Drivers License.
Weekend two of Coachella has been incredibly popular, abundant with A-list celebrities and more surprise guests.
Sabrina Carpenter wowed the audience on Friday night with a long set that told the story of a young girl navigating Hollywood throughout each song.
But just when fans thought the show couldn’t get any better Sabrina brought out Madonna, and they dueted a rendition of Like A Prayer.
Justin Bieber also wowed the crowd and got them in their feelings, bringing a laptop on stage to sing along to his old hits karaoke-style.
But PinkPantheress pulled out all the stops when it came to surprise guests.
The songstress brought out not one but three fellow musicians including Zara Larsson and Janelle Monae.
KATSEYE concluded the trio of surprise singers, and the crowd absolutely loved it.
Coachella festival is held annually at the Empire Polo Club in California.
The crowd roared with applause as the ladies danced around the stage and sangCredit: Coachella ReplayAddison is known for many hits, including Diet PepsiCredit: Getty
