GUTS Is A Dazzling Testament to Olivia Rodrigo's Growth
“I stumbled over all my words. I made it weird, I made it worse. Each time I step outside, it's social suicide,” Oliva Rodrigo shamefully confesses in “ballad of a homeschooled girl.” Rodrigo’s debut album was a smash hit, navigating the tribulations of teenage heartbreak. While SOUR is cohesive and well-written, you can’t help but feel like it only scratches the surface of Rodrigo’s psyche. She sings about being betrayed, but there’s a certain depth that’s missing from her lyricism. GUTS is the opposite; it's so unapologetically honest that it’s almost uncomfortable at times. The album has the heightened intensity you would expect from a veteran Disney star turned teenage pop phenomenon. While she may lead an existence that is so disconnected from the majority of ours, Rodrigo manages to be effortlessly relatable. Everything she does is tragic, every guy she likes is gay. The bluntness of her sophomore project is what makes it a standout.
The album’s first single, “vampire,” is reminiscent of SOUR’s surface-level anger. A guy wronged her, and she is upset. This is the formulaic thesis that dictates Rodrigo’s debut and the lead single for her second project. But “vampire” stands alone from the rest of GUTS in terms of content. Almost every other song on the album ventures into new territory. When she talks about heartbreak, her writing is more nuanced and self-reflective. As she delves into her internal conflict, her voice is noticeably more mature than in her previous work.
In the opening song, Rodrigo satirically boasts that she is an “all-american b****h” who is “built like a mother and a total machine.” The track serves as a humorous critique of the patriarchy. The Avril Lavigne-esque chorus juxtaposes the misogynistic archetype she personifies in the verses. Her frustration is palpable as she tries to balance impossible expectations of sexiness and modesty. Rodrigo ditches the subtext in the album’s second track and admits that she’s reconnecting with her ex, even if it’s a “bad idea…right?” The lighthearted tune is a necessary breath of fresh air amidst the emotional weight of the album.
The entire project has an intangible tension that feels like it’s leading to an inevitable breakdown. This strain culminates in the album’s sixth track. Amid Rodrigo’s turmoil, she reflects on her life in “making the bed.” Rodrigo pulls back the curtains of her curated image and becomes jarringly intimate. “Well, sometimes I feel like I don't wanna be where I am, getting drunk at a club with my fair-weather friends. Push away all the people who know me the best,” Rodrigo sings. This chorus feels like it could be the thesis of the album. At the pinnacle of her commercial success, Rodrigo feels lost. Ultimately, she blames herself: “But it's me who's been making the bed,” she admits. As much as she feels misguided, Rodrigo believes that her problems are mostly self-inflicted. She has been “making the bed” of her own misfortune but has no way of stopping the cycle. Rodrigo is no longer an angsty teenager; instead, she is a blooming adult with serious problems to contend with and her troubles are intensified by the scale of her stardom. Despite her unique circumstances, the song amplifies the anxious voice we all have, whether or not we’re global pop stars.
Some tracks are less hard-hitting, which balances out the gut-wrenching intensity of the ones that are. The album’s most low-stakes song is the lighthearted “get him back!” where Rodrigo cleverly plays with the idea that she wants to enact revenge on her ex and “get him back!” but also wants to reconnect and “get him back.” The track serves as a good break from the high-strung nature of the LP, but its variation from the majority of the album borders on incohesion. The catchy chorus toes the line between an upbeat punk track and sounding like a Disney original theme song. It’s not unlistenable but feels like a stark drop-off in quality compared to its accompanying tracks. Lying between the album’s hits and misses are quiet triumphs. In the album’s muted fifth song, “lacy,” Rodrigo quietly basks in her complicated jealousy for an anonymous girl, using “lacy” as a pseudonym for the ambiguous figure. It takes guts to be so candid about your envy, but Rodrigo’s willingness to say the quiet part out loud makes this project so special.
Not every song is exceptional, though. Ballads like “logical” and “the grudge” feel like lackluster attempts at the iconic, soul-crushing anthems Rodrigo is notorious for. The stripped-down piano and melancholy self-pity feel like Rodrigo is sonically and lyrically reverting back to her debut roots. This pair of songs is far from bad, but they feel like filler without adding much to the album’s narrative.
Since she stepped into the public eye some two years ago, Rodrigo has been impossibly transparent about her heartbreaks, successes, and emotional hardships. In “teenage dream” Rodrigo considers her unconventional teenage experience. Within the context of her discography, this song is an unmistakable conclusion of her whirlwind adolescence. In “brutal”, the opening track on SOUR, Rodrigo complains, “I’m so sick of 17, where’s my f****g teenage dream?” And then in “teenage dream,” Olivia despairs, "I fear that they already got all the best parts of me and I'm sorry that I couldn't always be your teenage dream.” The song is an admittance that Rodrigo never got the “teenage dream” she always longed for. Now, she’s twenty and yearns for direction but can’t seem to find it. The song is eerily hushed through the first two choruses. Then, Rodrigo's frustration boils over during the bridge. The drums intensify and all of the complicated emotions Rodrigo addresses throughout the album seem to simultaneously spill out. The result is a chilling combination of Rodrigo’s anguished vocals backed by a muffled guitar. Then, the instrumental falls away and Rodrigo is left alone again. A stripped-down piano plays the final few notes as the song fades into a childhood voice recording. GUTS’ biggest asset is that it feels like an intimate confessional, instead of a sanitized story carefully arranged to appease an audience. The concluding silence feels like a natural denouement to Rodrigo’s series of heartfelt admissions. The final piano chords play softly to the tune of Rodrigo’s first single, “driver's license,” which feels like an ode to the star’s evident growth since her debut.
By Sawyer Sugarman