expectations (feat. Chappell Roan)

Most breakup songs are about the person who left. This one is about the list that comes after. "expectations" is a brisk, jittery piece of new wave pop in which Olivia Rodrigo stops asking what went wrong with her and starts drafting the terms of whoever comes next. The remix, which brings in Chappell Roan, takes that list and hands it to a second narrator with a different set of disappointments and the same refusal to settle.

It is a song about standards, but it never sounds stern. It sounds like someone pacing a room, half laughing at herself, trying out confident sentences to see whether they hold her weight.

Where the song comes from

The original is the twelfth of thirteen tracks on You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, Rodrigo's third album, released on June 12, 2026.^[1] It was written by Rodrigo with Dan Nigro and Amy Allen, and Nigro produced it with Mike Wise.^[1] Nigro has been Rodrigo's closest collaborator since her debut, and the album as a whole follows a single relationship from infatuation to decline, drawing on a stretch of time she spent in London.^[5]

Rodrigo has described the origin of this track in unusually practical terms. She told Hits 1 that Nigro challenged her to write a mantra song, the kind of pop or rap track that simply announces what the singer is worth. She called the result a manifestation tool, adding a hopeful "let's hope" to the description.^[2] That framing matters. The song is not a report on a settled state of confidence. It is an attempt to speak confidence into existence.

The remix arrived on October 15, 2026, through Interscope, after a teaser on Rodrigo's Instagram story and an announcement two days earlier.^[1][4] It was billed as Chappell Roan's first guest feature and as Rodrigo's first remix, though Roan had long since sung backing vocals for her and opened for her on tour.^[3][2]

A list written after the damage

The first half of the song reads like a dating profile composed by someone who has been burned. A wealthy, comfortable man from Rodrigo's recent past has had his number blocked. Then comes a run of conditions: no passive partners, no men who invent impressive careers, no one who dithers when asked to commit.^[1] The comedy is in the specificity. These are not abstract virtues. They are the exact, slightly absurd failures of a certain kind of Los Angeles suitor, named so that they can be ruled out.

Writers covering the song have noticed that the humor cuts in two directions. Capital FM reads it as Rodrigo teasing her own habit of dating men who fall short while insisting she will choose better next time.^[2] The mockery of the indecisive ex is aimed at him, but the joke about the pattern is aimed at her. That double edge is what keeps the song from sounding smug.

Some critics have also heard an echo of the album's closing ballad, which turns toward regret and blame. Placed second to last, "expectations" works like a bright detour before that sadness lands.^[1] Read in sequence, the confidence is real but fragile, and the album seems to know it.

Confidence as performance

The sound does a lot of the interpretive work. Critics have filed the track under new wave, synth-pop, dance-punk and electropop, and they have reached for comparisons like the B-52s.^[1] Rolling Stone heard a twitchy, electro-funhouse energy, NME called it dance-punk mania, and Stereogum described a pulsing new wave rager that was incandescent in its bitterness.^[1]

That last phrase is useful. The bitterness is audible under the gloss. The rhythm is nervous and propulsive, the synths bright and a little brittle, and the vocal swings between deadpan and exasperated. A calmer arrangement would have made the speaker sound enlightened. This one makes her sound like someone convincing herself, which is more honest and a good deal more fun.

There is a long tradition of this posture in pop: the self-help song disguised as a dance track. What separates "expectations" from the genre's sillier entries is that it admits the effort. A mantra only needs repeating because the speaker has not yet fully believed it.

The second verse and the queer turn

The remix adds a new verse and a set of ad libs, and it adjusts some of the choruses so that the people being held to account are women rather than men.^[1] Roan's verse takes the same standards and applies them to a woman who made a plan after a concert and then never followed through, a recognizably Los Angeles kind of flake.^[2]

The verse is best understood as Roan extending Rodrigo's thesis to a new setting and testing whether it survives the change, rather than as a confession. The standards stay the same, and only the person falling short is different.

The origin of the verse is part of the story. Rodrigo told Apple Music that while they were writing it, she was recounting the strange things men had done to her, and Roan suggested she try dating women. Rodrigo's reply, as she recalled it, was that it is wild out there.^[2] Roan later praised her for being willing to share a song with a fully queer verse, saying it showed her support and felt feminist.^[2]

The result is quietly radical for a mainstream pop duet. It does not frame queerness as a twist or a revelation. The disappointment is simply shared across orientations, and the joke lands the same way. Dating is exhausting for everyone, and the standards are worth keeping regardless of who is on the other end.

How the remix changes the sound

Roan's section is not only a lyrical swap. Reviewers noted chiptune touches and a faster drum groove under her verse, a harmony from Rodrigo on one chorus, and a belted finish near the end that climbs into the top of her range.^[1] Pitchfork named the remix its best new track of the week and praised the new-wave quality of Roan's voice, while another reviewer said it reaches greater and gayer heights than the original.^[1]

Billboard described the second half as supercharged by Roan's powerhouse vocals.^[1] That seems right. The original is a solo monologue, and the remix turns it into a conversation, or perhaps a contest. Two distinct voices, one campy and theatrical and the other sardonic and wounded, trade the same complaint back and forth.

The game show

The video leans into the idea that dating runs on rules and scoring. Directed by Bardia Zeinali, it stages "The Big Expectations Show," a fictional retro game show in which Rodrigo and Roan compete as contestants.^[3][4] The set parodies familiar formats like Jeopardy!, Hollywood Squares, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud.^[1]

David Byrne plays the host, Johnny Johnson, in a Bob Barker-style turn, and Nigro makes a cameo.^[3] The casting is a sly choice. Byrne is a patron saint of the jittery art-pop that the song borrows from, so his presence works as an unofficial blessing on its lineage.

The game show conceit also offers a reading of the title. Expectations are a scoring system. You announce the criteria, you tally the results, and someone fails the round. Making that literal turns an emotional stance into slapstick, which keeps the song from becoming a lecture.

Why it resonates

Part of the appeal is timing. Rodrigo came up writing about devastation, and her early hits made heartbreak feel enormous and unwinnable. Here she writes about the stage that follows, when the grief has curdled into pickiness and the pickiness has begun to feel like self-respect. It is a less cinematic emotion, but a more common one.

The song also fits a moment in which pop audiences have been receptive to an openly queer, openly funny kind of stardom. Roan's presence reads as an invitation into that space, and Rodrigo's willingness to hand over a verse suggests she hears her own songs as bigger than a single perspective.

Commercially, the album it belongs to debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 485,000 units, and the track itself debuted at number 20 on the Hot 100.^[1][3]

Other ways to hear it

A more skeptical listener might hear the song as a performance of confidence that is cheerfully aware of its own thinness. Because it sits so close to the album's closing admission of regret, the rules could be read as armor, the sort of thing a person writes when she is not actually ready to date at all.^[1]

A more generous reading treats the mantra at face value. On this view the list is a real act of self-definition, the first time the narrator has put her needs in writing. The jokes are how she makes the declaration bearable. Both readings can be true at once, and the song seems built to hold them together.

There is also a collaborative reading that only exists after the remix. If the original is a woman talking to herself, the remix suggests that these standards are shared property, a kind of communal wisdom passed between friends who compare notes on the same bad experiences.

Conclusion

"expectations" works because it is funny without being dismissive and firm without being cold. It treats the act of naming what you want as both serious and a little ridiculous, which is probably how it feels to do it. The original gives the idea its jittery shape, and the Chappell Roan version widens it, so that a private pep talk becomes a duet about what two people refuse to put up with.

Neither version pretends the confidence is permanent. That is the best thing about it. The song is a rehearsal, and anyone who has stood in front of a mirror practicing a firmer sentence will recognize the exercise.