GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album, is a lyrically developed and self-assured follow up to SOUR, consistently navigating the thread of being a young woman in her twenties during the 2020s. Rodrigo clearly knows what she is good at, and has run with it.
Though GUTS has been criticised as presenting a “sugar-coated girl-power”, this is a misunderstanding of the very crux of what Rodrigo is attempting to plot on this album. Tracks such as ‘all-American bitch’ and ‘lacy’, the former drawing from Joan Didion’s 1968 essay in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, demonstrate Rodrigo’s isolation of the paradoxical and unattainable standard she finds herself being held to. “I am built like a mother and a total machine” holds in tandem the age-old reductive binary, yet she finds herself wanting to play into this feminine ideal, “Bardot reincarnate”.
Flip-flopping between unashamedly bratty, confessional calling-outs, and commentaries on young womanhood is emblematic of Rodrigo doing just that; even within the album’s track list is she making the seemingly oppositional, compatible.
Rodrigo’s strengths lie undoubtedly in the bigger pop punk anthems, such as ‘vampire’, ‘bad idea right?’ and ‘get him back!’. She demonstrates a command of disarming frankness and candid lyricism reminiscent of the pens of Lana Del Rey and Lily Allen. She manages to encapsulate the painful confusion, upset and anger of heartbreak, confessing “I wanna meet his mom/Just to tell her her son sucks”.
Whilst not a ground-breaking, musically pivotal album, this is pop music done well. Not only because it has the necessary components of catchy hooks and aurally pleasing harmonies that are singable in the shower, but because they are also lyrically resonant. Rodrigo hasn’t fallen into the successful first album trap of making the follow-up exclusively about the unrelatable navigation of new found fame or dating celebrities. Rather, she uses her experiences of being perceived at large and having failed, messy relationships to make an album that contains both the put downs we all wish we’d said, as well encapsulating an acute feeling of being undermined and belittled as a young woman.
Rodrigo ironically handles her own confusion with such precision that allows her music to speak to innumerable shared experiences and feelings. This is what good pop music should do, and hers is complete with tension-and-release hooks coloured in a commercially viable punk rock purple.
“Olivia Rodrigo” by rocor is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
