The best thing about Olivia Rodrigo, at 23, top of the world, is that age. She’s full of uncertainty and doe-eyed confidence. She’s pure promise eager to be fulfilled, but maybe a bit timid still. There’s a self-aware cringe in her best songs; she knows she’s far from the first to sing about what she sings about. But there’s also a steamrolling disregard for anyone who might think it’s not worth singing. All of this is present, right now, bursting. She played a sold-out United Center on Sunday on her “Unraveled Tour,” and I wish I went on the second night, Monday, mainly because Rodrigo is evolving fast — every hour counts.

Really, there’s nothing I don’t like about her.

Except her music, and I like her music, just not as much as her taste, her lyrics, her excellent band, her enthusiasm for showing love to the artists who inspired her, and the career peak you suspect is right around the corner. Her smart new album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” which plays like a wise step right before a bolder breakthrough, veers so lovingly into ‘80s new wave and ‘90s alt rock (The Cure, Gang of Four, New Order, Smashing Pumpkins), it’s like someone playing you great new (old) songs they just heard, thrilled at fresh possibilities. You want to make her a mix of PJ Harvey and Kim Gordon’s Sonic Youth songs and return a year later to hear what stuck. She’s already writing lines so twisted — “Sometimes at a low point I even wish for tragedy / Cause I know he’ll come over and take real good care of me” — that Tom Waits could take notes. On “Purple,” which began with Rodrigo curled in a fetal ball on stage, she sang “I melt with you …” and it was sincere, a surrender and a retro wink, all at once.

Rodrigo is big on motifs, and so the show, like the new album, is conceptual.

Growth, decline, renewal, rinse, repeat — the seasons of our life.

Take the remarkable stage: Rodrigo reimagined the big impersonal concert arena setting as a warm meadow. Not a handful of flowers for effect, a striking sea of pink and white faux flowers that coat every inch of the stage, the back of the stage, where the band stands, and down the catwalks extending far into the United Center. (“How is she going to walk in that?” I heard more than a couple of people wonder before the music started.) Then, throughout the two-hour show, she tore at this artful meadow, skipped through it, joyfully kicked at stalks of flowers with her combat boots. This is the first concert I have attended that required a grounds crew — every handful of songs, a dozen gardener/roadies would rush onto the stage in the dark and rearrange and reset any fallen flora.

It’s also a sorta organic extension of Rodrigo.

Like the flowers on that stage, she seems real, but there’s lots of theater involved. Rodrigo began as a child star on the Disney Channel, and hammy theater-kid broadness is never far off. On the other hand, like a great torch singer, you absolutely believe she’s in the moment: “Maybe I’m too emotional,” she snarled bitterly, tearing down a flowerbed.

Her subject, of course, is young love, messy relationships, but there’s such a bracing immediacy, and naïveté, to her best songs, it’s like processing the ups and downs and confusion of romance in real time. She saved “Drivers License,” for instance, her blockbuster debut, for the end of the night, and as familiar as its lyrics are — she let the audience sing stretches unaided — its key image, Rodrigo circling the street of a former flame, not understanding how anyone could move on, has lost no power. On “Cigarette Smoke” — a showcase live for how painfully vulnerable Rodrigo can let herself sound — a regretful, resentful lover simply waits for the exact second when “memories turn dark.”

The peppy, post-punk Rodrigo isn’t dead — she spends nearly as much time in the audience as Springsteen — but increasingly it’s the least interesting thing about her. She’s favoring the kind of surging operatic grandiosity Billy Corgan would appreciate. She sounds willing to risk something. On her closer, a rocker with a touch of robotic Devo chanting in the chorus, she repeated, “These days, I’ve got expectations.” On paper, it’s another song about finding a good guy, but in concert, it’s about the future.

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