Olivia Rodrigo and Robert Smith of The Cure team up to duet on this perfect love song, What’s Wrong With Me.

When Olivia Rodrigo brought Robert Smith onstage at Glastonbury a year ago, her teenage fans must have wondered whether he was her grandad. Paying homage to her favourite band, they sang Just Like Heaven and Friday I’m In Love together, his pained vocal intertwining perfectly with hers.

It could have been cringe – big old Robert with his scarecrow hair, eyeliner and baggy black robes, and tiny little Liv in her tiny white designer corset – yet their voices dovetailed perfectly. 

She was so obviously thrilled that her “personal hero” had accepted her invitation, and the famously collab-averse Smith, seemed delighted to bask in the glow of a festival crowd; even if they had come to see someone else.

It seemed like one of those one-off festival moments; at least until last month’s Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, where they were back onstage together to duet on a new song she had written.

What’s Wrong With Me clearly channels her love of The Cure, and now it’s on her new album, a song cycle about the beginning, middle and end of a relationship (not with him – don’t be silly). In fact the whole album – “you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love” – is an extended tribute.

The opening song, Drop Dead, has a lyric that includes the words “just like heaven,” another song is literally called The Cure, and at least one other, U + Me = <3, sounds exactly like them; at least until she starts to sing. 

But this is the standout song for me: the yearning in both voices complements each other’s perfectly, and Rodrigo accurately articulates that feeling of being so in love you can’t concentrate on anything else.

As she worte on Instagram: “I am still in disbelief that Robert, who is in my eyes one of the most brilliant, legendary, wonderful people to ever exist, is on this record with me.”

She might have come to attention at 17 as a pop-punk princess straight out of a Disney TV show but Olivia Rodrigo has always been much more than that, and this is further evidence of a serious artist who’s here to stay.