Between shimmering guitars and a doleful piano line, a song from Olivia Rodrigo’s second album called Making the Bed offers a grim picture of fame. “I wanted it so I got it,” she admits, before making clear it wasn’t what she bargained for: being treated “like a tourist attraction”, haunted by dreams of being in a car without brakes that “can’t swerve off the road”. It feels realistic, partly because it’s studded with self-loathing at her apparent ingratitude and worries that she’s “playing the victim” and partly because Rodrigo clearly knows what she’s talking about.
You would be hard-pushed to call her 2021 debut album, Sour, anything other than a phenomenon. It broke sales records, won Grammys and made her the solitary new artist in the last two years admitted to pop’s rarefied upper echelons, the multi-platinum realm of Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, where albums don’t just sell on release, they keep on doing so for years: Guts is being launched into a Top 20 that Sour has yet to vacate.
Perhaps its success wasn’t surprising. If the rise of Billie Eilish obviated the need for teenage listeners to distil universal, #relatable lessons from Swift’s sagas of romance and enmity among young habitués of the entertainment world – Eilish was a teenager, talking about teenage stuff, with nary a film star boyfriend nor supermodel frenemy in sight – then Rodrigo’s songs rendered things more straightforward still. They stripped away both the left-field electronic aspects of Eilish’s sound and the gothic horror aspects of her lyrics in favour of big ballads and polished pop-punk – inhabiting a musical universe where Avril Lavigne’s Let Go and Pink’s Missundaztood occupy the same position of influence that the Stooges’ and the New York Dolls’ eponymous debuts occupied during punk itself – and song titles that read like double-underlined phrases in an adolescent diary: Guts features Get Him Back!, Pretty Isn’t Pretty, Bad Idea Right? and Love Is Embarrassing. Any intimations that their subjects are fellow celebrities are smartly batted away in interviews, among them the persistent rumour that Guts’s lead single Vampire – which stirs both polarities of Rodrigo’s style together with a hint of Broadway showstopper – is aimed at Swift, who was given 50% of the songwriting credits to Rodrigo’s Deja Vu after similarities with the former’s Cruel Summer were pointed out; better to present something that feels familiar to her audience’s daily lives than an acerbic transmission from a distant star-studded universe.
The sound of Guts is noticeably tougher than its predecessor, as if taking Sour’s Elvis Costello-indebted opener Brutal as its starting point: more distorted guitars, a live sound underlined by the presence of count-ins and discussions among the musicians about which song they’re playing next, a hint of grunge-era alt-rock in the quiet-loud dynamics of Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl and a sprinkling of sprechgesang vocals that probably have something to do with Wet Leg, but which, allied to the lumbering syncopated rhythm and massed-vocal chorus of Get Him Back!, more clearly conjure up the spectre of early 00s rap-rock.
But the most striking thing is how little global stardom has caused Rodrigo to loosen her grasp on topics close to her fanbase’s heart. Making the Bed’s wracked account of fame is an outlier here: elsewhere, Guts offers a round of adolescent concerns, among them social awkwardness (Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl), romantic rejection (The Grudge), seemingly perfect love rivals (the Jolene-esque figure of Lacy) and a succession of bad boyfriends that vary from unfortunately irresistible (Bad Idea Right?) to patronising older man: “I was too young, I was too soft, can’t take a joke, can’t get you off,” she snaps on Logical.
The other striking thing is how sharp her lyrics are, behind their unassuming conversational veneer: only Pretty Isn’t Pretty’s assault on beauty standards feels a little boilerplate. Elsewhere, she’s witty, as on Bad Idea Right? – “I told my friends I was asleep, but I never said where or in whose sheets” – and stingingly acerbic. Brutal’s borrowing from Costello was both unexpected and somehow telling, and at her angriest, Rodrigo’s lyrics can feel as if they’re recasting accusatory bitterness – Costello’s initial default setting – for a younger, female audience. “Hate to give the satisfaction, asking how you’re doing now / How’s the castle built off people you pretend to care about?” opens Vampire, lines that could have walked straight off This Year’s Model or My Aim Is True.
It’s sharp enough to appeal beyond its obvious constituency, reaching people for whom the phrase witheringly deployed in closer Teenage Dream – “great for my age” – has slightly different resonances than it does for Rodrigo. But that is a secondary concern here, as is the question of whether Rodrigo can grow with her audience and continue serving their interests when they no longer have to, as Making the Bed puts it, pretend to be older than they are. That’s the future: in the present moment, it’s hard to imagine they won’t lap Guts up.
This week Alexis listened to
Tapir! – Gymnopédie
A song that on paper shouldn’t work – borrowing from Erik Satie is a well-worn idea – but, in reality works beautifully, unfolding into a lovely warm sound that recalls a lo-fi Lambchop.
