Olivia Rodrigo imagines punk as it seemed when you were a kid: loud, angry, melodic, giddily girly, the kind of music that Lindsay Lohan played in Freaky Friday and which Josie and the Pussycats used to wake the world up from a state of bubblegum-pop-induced hypnosis. Rodrigo’s firecracker second album, Guts, draws from beloved pop-rock both classic and contemporary – Liz Phair, Courtney Barnett, Weezer – but it feels most indebted to this Hollywood version of punk, which somehow seemed snarlier and snarkier than anything that existed in the real world.
Guts is Rodrigo’s follow-up to 2021’s world-beating Sour, the kind of once-in-a-blue-moon debut that turns someone into an A-list megastar overnight. On that record, Rodrigo often cast herself as a scorned ingenue done wrong by a shitty guy and, occasionally, the world at large. Guts, as a title, is a statement of bravado and one of fallibility: on this album, Rodrigo is more brazen and far less sure of herself, scaling impossible heights before reminding herself, often callously, that she’s human. She goes to parties and word-vomits other people’s secrets, before screaming bloody “social suiciiiiiideeeee!” She laughs off a crap guy to her friends then leaves the sesh early to meet up with him. She saves her most vitriolic ballad for another woman, mere moments after acknowledging the pressure of being “a perfect all-American bitch”.
