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”.
All-American Bitch, Guts’s opener and one of the most exhilaratingly caustic rock songs of the year, is the album’s linchpin, introducing an album on which Rodrigo is in a constant battle between feminist duty and her base impulses towards desire and jealousy. Her friends hover over the boy-backsliding anthem Bad Idea Right? like a catty Greek chorus, the breathy charge in Rodrigo’s voice tempered by wry guilt. The most devastating moment on Vampire, a breakup ballad whose musical-theatre-ness is its key strength, arrives not in its knockout chorus but when Rodrigo admits: “Every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news / You called them crazy, God, I hate the way I called them crazy too.”
Rodrigo, 20, grew up in an era in which it was a given for pop stars to self-identify as feminists but all-too-rare for them to actually delve into the complexities of such a label, or reckon with the fact that claiming strength and empowerment doesn’t preclude one from cruel or ruthless impulses. She acknowledges that idea briefly on Vampire but it’s Lacy, a quiet and absolutely vicious ballad, on which she dives into it headfirst, outright admitting to a female rival that, “I just loathe you lately.” Internet speculation over who Lacy is about loses sight of how masterful it is: spiteful and amorous, filled with some avant garde one-liners – “skin like puff pastry” – and agonisingly wounded at the same time.
It’s telling of Rodrigo’s shrewdness as a songwriter that Lacy is the hardest-hitting song on Guts. Unlike her one-time mentor Taylor Swift, romance is not life-or-death in Rodrigo’s world, but losing a friend, or losing your sense of self just to roast her, might be. Guys, on the other hand, are just grist to the mill: Get Him Back!, Guts’s galvanising peak, is destined to close Rodrigo’s live show for as long as she lives. A chugging, lighters-up anthem – Girl Weezer, if you will, for the year of “girl dinner” and “girl math” – it, like the rest of Guts, lives in an emotional grey area, but this time it’s between revenge and reconciliation. It’s Guts to a T: toxic, messy and a total headrush.
