Olivia Rodrigo just gave fans a scavenger hunt. The singer surprise released a new non album track, “Serena Joy,” exclusively as a limited edition CD single, with only 500 copies pressed and sold solely through Analog Music Shop, an independent record store in Tustin, California. The copies sold out within hours.
The song takes its name from Serena Joy Waterford, the character from Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” who helps build an oppressive patriarchal regime only to become trapped by it herself. Rodrigo recorded the track during sessions for her latest album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, but ultimately left it off the tracklist because it didn’t fit the record’s chronological narrative.
The drop is tied to Rodrigo’s upcoming all women music festival, Daisy Chain Fields, taking place in Irvine’s Great Park, just miles from the record shop. The store explained the choice in a social media post, writing that it wanted to support “an artist building a stage for women in music and raising funds for women and girls.”
The lyrics never mention Serena Joy or Gilead directly, but the message is unmistakable. “If they do it to them, they’ll do it to you,” Rodrigo sings, a warning about complicity that lands even without the overt references. A wider digital release is expected soon, but for now, “Serena Joy” belongs to whoever got lucky at one record store in Orange County.
