Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album GUTS dropped on September 8, and if you were at all worried that it wouldn’t meet the standard she set with her debut SOUR, fear not. It’s better.
Rodrigo first cast her net to a wide audience with the overnight hit “drivers license,” and for about a month at the beginning of 2022, it’s all anyone in the United States was listening to. The song had many a millennial woman wondering why she related so heavily to the song’s lyrics despite it ostensibly being about a teenage girl who just earned the legal right to drive, and the confusion only increased when SOUR dropped and we were playing every track at full volume.
GUTS is a Step Up from SOUR
With GUTS, it’s much more apparent why Rodrigo has captured the hearts of so many who might’ve first written her off as a teenager with a good voice complaining about adolescent boys. On her second studio album, Rodrigo has taken all the best components of SOUR and amplified them – a clear voice and vision, sonics that perfectly match the lyrics, and bars upon bars about the experience of womanhood.
Rodrigo, at the ripe age of 20, knows what it’s like to be a woman, and she’s proven that it’s not all that different from being a teenage girl. Our reactions to our feelings might become more measured and responsible as we age, but our emotions are just the same, and Rodrigo overwhelmingly speaks to our emotions and not our actions.
Take “making the bed,” the album’s sixth track and a biting ballad about self-destruction; “love is embarrassing,” a comical reminder of all the times we’ve crushed on someone who’s, well, embarrassing; or “pretty isn’t pretty,” the penultimate track that laments about the impossible beauty standards we face. Those experiences aren’t reserved for high schoolers – they’re universal for women. Rodrigo aptly sums them up.
Olivia Rodrigo Has a True Talent
A further credit to her writing, even when Rodrigo does so clearly sing about her own experiences – like in “teenage dream,” a song about her incredibly unique situation as somewhat of a songwriting prodigy and deeply personal fear that she’ll never progress – we can still relate. Sure, we don’t have millions of fans pressuring us to procure another hit album, but we all fear aging in some way. What if it doesn’t, in fact, get better?
How Rodrigo gained such wisdom is unclear. She did start acting as a young girl and likely spent ample time around adults growing up, but she’s obviously still familiar with the teenage experience (albeit certain lyrics point to her teenage experience being a little more Hollywood than most – we weren’t all let into bars and clubs to get drunk at age 19). What seems most likely is that Rodrigo is just an honor student of the human experience, giftedly able to turn billions of women’s thoughts into superb music. Instead of questioning it, we’ll just listen.
GUTS is streaming now wherever you listen to music.