Olivia Rodrigo, now armed with her shiny new "drivers license," hits the road again in the music video for her second single, "deja vu."
While the song finds Rodrigo once again caught up in a torturous love triangle, this time it's less about her ex, and more about the one he moved on with. The singer is frustrated that her ex seems to have wholly replaced her, and gone as far as copy-pasting the quirky things they shared as a couple (like singing Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl" together) with his new relationship. Rodrigo is obsessed with her ex's new love interest (played by Talia Ryder), going as far as watching her on TV screens and copying her outfits.
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“So when you gonna tell her that we did that, too?” Rodrigo sings. “She thinks it’s special but it’s overused / That was our place, I found it first / I made the jokes you tell to her / When she’s with you / Do you get déjà vu when she’s with you?”
However, she realises that the object of her fixation is obsessed with her right back — and soon it becomes unclear who is who. It's all very Killing Eve meets Persona.
“I thought it’d be interesting to write a song, using deja vu, about how sometimes when somebody moves on in a relationship and they get with a new partner, you watch it and you’re like, ‘oh my gosh, that was all of the stuff that I did,'" Olivia told American Songwriter of the song. "I think that’s a really relatable, universal thing."
The 18-year-old High School Musical: The Musical: The Series star wrote the track a month after writing the viral hit “drivers license," which spent eight weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Both tracks will be featured on Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, out May 21.