Review: GUTS: a second successful portrait of a teenagemind

A week into 2021, the American pop music landscape was seismically altered by the release of an angsty, heartache-filled piano ballad that immediately broke the internet and ultimately broke records: “drivers license,” by the then-17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo. The rest of her debut album, SOUR, followed suit, painting a picture of quintessential teenage girlhood through the varying genres of ballads, rock anthems, and other in-betweens. Needless to say, the pressure of a groundbreaking debut, coupled with the theory of the inevitable “sophomore slump,” created high expectations and even higher stakes when the release date for Rodrigo’s second album was announced. She promised unabashed honesty and emotion in the aptly titled GUTS.

Many artists fall victim to a sophomore slump. After a successful first album, an artist might try to replicate the styles and process that worked the first time, or aim for a polar opposite of their old brand to prove a point about range. Either way, many creators fall short while trying to affirm or re-establish their creative identities.

Rodrigo seems to have taken a hidden third approach: exploring unseen angles of her first album’s themes by expressing her feelings about the overnight success of SOUR. The album includes the drama and rawness that reliably accompany teenage breakup songs, but still includes songs that provide humor and nuance. The opening track, “all american bi**h,” compares her perceived identity as a perfect pop icon to her own ordinariness in a way that exposes the tightrope-walk that women have to perform routinely: to be “grateful all the time,” “sexy and kind,” and to express emotion in a way that appeals to a patriarchal society.

It is what Rodrigo does: she distills these universal big feelings of angst, frustration with societal expectations, pain, and empowerment down to catchy choruses and plot-twisting bridges. She skillfully weaves details into her songs that reward close listening, and she has become the voice of a generation that is victim to crushing social structures that shame it for feeling deeply.

Throughout the album, it is clear that Rodrigo wrote these songs as a way to cope with these generation-specific struggles, such as dating in a world of social media, body image, and growing up. A clear focus is her age and the role it plays in her identity. In the opening track, she states, “I know my age, and I act like it,” later referencing her age in the context of relationships she has been in. She ends the album with “teenage dream,” which explores the impending inevitability of growing up, and, in her case, feeling like she has peaked too early.

The album itself ends with sounds of producer Dan Nigro’s nine-month-old daughter giggling and cooing, providing an innocent contrast to the themes of adulting and heartbreak that preceded it. Apart from the deeper songs about growth and pain, the album also delivers in the category of classic, petty, teenage-girl breakup angst. In track two, “bad idea right?,” the pre-chorus repeats “seeing you tonight, it’s a bad idea, right?” and the chorus is a cheerleader-like chant of self-rationalization. Track 8, “get him back!,” explains the patterns of a past relationship with humor and wit and is thoughtfully self-contradictory, using “get him back” to mean both seek revenge and resume the relationship.

So, is GUTS better than SOUR? Well, the general consensus seems to be a yes. The album reached No. 1 on Billboard’s 200 albums chart, every song from the album is currently in the 100 most popular streams on Apple Music and Spotify, and the fan reception to her GUTS World Tour announcement suggests that Rodrigo is not a one-hit wonder, but a solidified member of the American pop music canon. She did not fall into a trap of replicating what some might call a complaining or self-pitying pattern of lyrical content, and was still able to approach her second album with the same emotional vulnerability and truth that made SOUR a universal success. She has created a new generation of fight songs for a heartbroken teenager.