Olivia Rodrigo's first ever feature is Robert Smith of The Cure

Olivia Rodrigo's third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, is out today. Eleven months after we stood in front of her at Roskilde, the biggest news on the record is a name: Robert Smith. “What's Wrong With Me” is a full duet with The Cure frontman, and the first feature Rodrigo has ever put on a song, three albums in. She broke the news herself last Saturday at Primavera Sound, during a surprise set announced on her Instagram Stories five hours before stage time, by bringing Smith out partway into the live premiere. The two singles that led up to the album, “Drop Dead” and “The Cure”, had been winking at the band all spring; it turns out the actual Cure song was hiding somewhere else on the tracklist.

We did not see this one coming. Olivia Rodrigo and the frontman of The Cure is not a pairing you would have drawn up. But it is less random than it looks. Robert Smith found her through “Drivers License” and liked it enough to go and buy Sour and Guts on CD, and Rodrigo has called him a personal hero and, in her words, one of the best songwriters England has produced. They talk most weeks now. “Robert has been soundtracking my life for as long as I can remember,” she wrote to fans. The duet is not a stunt, it is two fans of each other finally in the same room.

Saturday in Barcelona

“It's really special to me for so many reasons, primarily because it's the first song I've ever had a feature on,” Rodrigo told the Primavera crowd on 6 June, introducing the song without saying who the feature was. Then Smith walked out. He was already on the grounds: The Cure had headlined the night before with a 29-song set, their first show in eighteen months. It was not even the pair's first time on a stage together. Smith joined Rodrigo's Glastonbury headline set in 2025 for “Just Like Heaven” and “Friday I'm in Love”, and the friendship stuck. “She calls me up quite a bit to talk about clothes and fashion,” Smith told Vogue recently, adding that the two shared “a couple of memorable nights in the studio together.”

What's next

The Unraveled Tour starts 25 September in Hartford, Connecticut: 65 dates across North America, Europe and the UK. Before that, we are heading back to Roskilde ourselves, where The Cure headline the new Orange Stage in their fiftieth year as a band. Ofcourse we are hoping Olivia wil drop by as well!

Roskilde, July 2025

We photographed Rodrigo at Roskilde Festival in Denmark on 4 July 2025, Colin in the pit. The stage was extremely high, the kind of height that leaves most of the pit shooting straight up at a chin. Colin is tall. That night it paid off. The frames in this piece are from that set. Check the photos via the album on coda.photos below.