Olivia Rodrigo is the British Vogue April 2026 cover star, and she used the interview to address two things the internet has been waiting on.
What is actually going on with Sabrina Carpenter, and what is the new album going to sound like.
The short answers are they are fine, and it is sad love songs. The longer answers are more interesting.
What’s Going On With Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter?
The feud rumors go back to January 2021, when Rodrigo released “Drivers License” at 17 years old and the song immediately became one of the biggest debut singles in pop history.
It hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there. It was heartbroken and raw and specific, and fans immediately started trying to identify everyone in it.
The “blonde girl” referenced in the lyrics was widely believed to be Sabrina Carpenter, who was at the time linked to Joshua Bassett, Rodrigo’s costar on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series and, per the song, the source of the heartbreak.
Weeks later, Carpenter released “Skin,” which contained the lyric “Maybe blonde was the only rhyme.” The internet treated it as a diss track. The feud narrative was established. It ran for years.
Rodrigo told British Vogue it was never real. “I think she’s great,” she said of Carpenter. “I’m so happy for all of her success too. I love the album she’s put out.” Then she paused, British Vogue noted she seemed “tense,” and added, “It’s just people just get weird and clickbaity. It’s all love, though. I’ve talked to her many times.”
That is as direct a statement as she has made on the subject. The two have been photographed at the same events over the years, chatting without apparent tension.
But this is the first time Rodrigo has said explicitly that they have spoken, multiple times, and that the relationship is affirmative.
Carpenter has had one of the biggest years in pop recently, her album Short n’ Sweet made her one of the most-streamed artists of 2024 and 2025.
Rodrigo’s praise for it, offered without qualification, is the loudest possible signal that whatever existed between them in 2021 is gone.
What Rodrigo expressed more frustration about was being 17 when it all happened.
“I was going through a break-up, working a full-time job, making Sour, a student in high school and taking, like, three AP classes,” she told British Vogue.
“Looking back, I always think, ‘Wow, life will never be as hard as it was when I was 17.'” She said she was shocked that people were “that mean” to her as a teenager, and that looking at kids that age now she can see they are “such a baby.” She also spoke more broadly about the child star pipeline: “We should examine the whole industry of child actors. It’s a very strange thing.”
Rodrigo On Her New Album
The third album, referred to by fans as OR3, does not yet have a title or a release date, but the promotional machinery is already running.
Earlier this week, walls were painted with Rodrigo’s initials in Los Angeles, Berlin, Sydney, Paris, Bangkok, Warsaw, and Toronto, all against the same pink background as her official website.
The cover interview confirms what those murals implied: something is coming, and it is close.
Rodrigo played British Vogue three songs from the album. Writer Amel Mukhtar described them as “instantly transporting, cinematic and so intimate.”
Rodrigo confirmed they are all “sad love songs,” adding: “I realized all my favourite romantic love songs were beautiful because they had a tinge of fear or yearning in them.”
The three songs are described in outline.
The first is the opening track, “smooth, trippy soft rock” about “the spirituality of finding the man of your dreams.” Rodrigo said of the subject: “The person that the song is about is great.”
The second traces what British Vogue describes as “the withdrawal symptoms of separation” and is inspired by Miranda and Steve’s relationship in Sex and the City, specifically Miranda’s line, “Whenever something funny happens, I always want to tell you about it.”
The third is the “dancier” and “experimental” one, with an orchestral ending, and Rodrigo described it as “what I think being in love feels like. You’re getting to the core of all of your issues, how you feel about yourself, your insecurities, what makes you joyful.
It feels like the most raw form of you, which is so scary and terrifying and uncomfortable, sometimes, but beautiful at times.”
She admitted that writing from a joyful place was “a creative challenge.” Her first two albums, Sour and GUTS, were built primarily on heartbreak and anger.
This one is different in its emotional starting point, even if the songs themselves still land in “tinge of fear or yearning” territory.
On Louis Partridge And London
Rodrigo did not directly address her relationship with British actor Louis Partridge, with whom she has been linked since 2023 and who she performed “So American” about at Glastonbury last summer.
Breakup rumors circulated in December. She did not confirm or deny them, but the geography of the interview tells its own story.
“I’ve found a lot of inspiration from being in London,” she told British Vogue. “I’ve spent so much time here over the course of making this album. It has a lot of songs that are London vibes, about experiences that I’ve had here.”
She described herself as a “self-professed Anglophile” who wants to “half move here one of these days.”
She said she can ride around London on a Lime bike without being recognized, which she initially interpreted as evidence that she was not big in the UK, until she decided British people are simply “just cool — they don’t want to bug you.”
Partridge told Esquire UK last September: “Olivia and I choose, or have been choosing, to not be so public.”
The British Vogue interview is consistent with that, the relationship is present in the album without being announced in the interview.
The song about “the man of your dreams” is there. The “London vibes” are there. The person that the song is about, she confirmed, is great.
What Else Did Olivia Rodrigo Say?
On fame and the party circuit she briefly entered, “I had an era, for sure, when I was going to weird parties and excited by the new town that I had just been invited into… and very quickly realised that that’s not my scene. Just weird clubs with weird people.” She said she tries to live a “very chill, normal life” now.
While speaking on the relationship between being in love and self-esteem, Rodrigo said, “I felt a similar way about falling in love, that the second I’m in a really great relationship, I’m gonna start feeling good about myself and this stuff is going to fall into place, but it just doesn’t work like that.”
The British Vogue April 2026 issue is available via digital download now and on newsstands from March 24.
