LOS ANGELES, June 13 -- The pop star who built her career on knife-twist breakup songs released an album of love songs on Friday, and the love songs got harder to write halfway through. Olivia Rodrigo's third record, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, arrived on Geffen with a sound she has not made before, a duet with the man who invented the genre it borrows from, and an unmistakable creak in the floorboards underneath the romance.

The album, produced again by Dan Nigro, trades the pop-punk of Guts for soft 1980s pop and New Wave textures, NPR critic Hazel Cills wrote, and its central conceit, the chronological story of Rodrigo's first serious relationship from honeymoon to wreckage, takes a structural risk her catalog has not a...