Temecula, CA · pop · pop-punk

Olivia Rodrigo

2 festivals played ↓

Gen-Z's laureate of the breakup — SOUR bedroom confessionals grown into GUTS pop-punk stadium catharsis.

Olivia Rodrigo was born in 2003 in Murrieta, California, and grew up in neighboring Temecula, the only child of a schoolteacher and a family therapist. She is half-Filipina, with grandparents who emigrated from the Philippines, and grew up on her parents' record collection of No Doubt, Pearl Jam, the White Stripes and Green Day.

She started as a child actress, appearing in commercials before landing a direct-to-video film in 2015. Disney Channel's Bizaardvark cast her as guitar-playing Paige Olvera from 2016, and in 2019 she took the lead role of Nini Salazar-Roberts on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, for which she also wrote and performed songs.

Signing with Geffen Records in 2020, she began releasing music under her own name. Her debut album, Sour, moved between spare piano ballads and distorted guitar-driven tracks; its follow-up, Guts, pushed further into pop-punk and power-pop territory. Her writing stays direct and detailed, centred on adolescent anger, jealousy and heartbreak, developed closely with producer Dan Nigro.

Sour topped the Billboard 200 and nine other charts worldwide, driven by the number-one singles "Drivers License" and "Good 4 U." Guts and a third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, each opened at number one too, with "Vampire" and "Drop Dead," making her the first artist whose lead single from each of their first three albums topped the chart.

Live, she performs with a full band, swinging between quiet solo moments and full-volume rock arrangements. Her awards include three Grammys, four MTV Video Music Awards and seven Billboard Music Awards, and she was named Time's Entertainer of the Year in 2021 and Billboard's Woman of the Year in 2022.

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poppop-punk