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.
