Olivia Rodrigo is back to spill her guts on her sophomore album. Rodrigo is a name that has recently taken the music industry by storm. Despite coming from a Disney Channel background, starring in “Bizardvark” and “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” Rodrigo has proved again that she is much more than her past.
From the single “All I Want” from “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” and her album, SOUR, that broke numerous records.
GUTS came out on Sept.8th, 2023, and has already had nearly 100 million streams.
GUTS is musically different from SOUR, with loud guitars and drums, fast-paced songs, and fewer ballads. In her Rolling Stone interview, Rodrigo says “Our goal was to make something a little more playful, a record that didn’t take itself so seriously”. She also explains that she took a lot of inspiration from 90s rock bands, like Babes In Toyland and Rage Against The Machine.
Rodrigo expressed that she was nervous about writing her sophomore album and the pressure to top SOUR. SOUR and GUTS are two very different albums that revolve around two different things.
While SOUR’s songs focus on heartbreak, GUTS’s songs are about growing up and experiencing girlhood.
Rodrigo has grown as a person and musically in GUTS, and I personally love the harder edge on the album. Songs like All All American B**ch, Bad Idea Right, Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl, and Love is Embarrassing lean into the edgier influence that Rodrigo talks about and align perfectly with the content of the songs and her singing about the anger and passionate emotions teenage girls face.
Vampire, Lacy, Logical, and Teenage Dream are more reminiscent of SOUR, but they also work with the content of the songs, with Rodrigo touching on the more depressing moments of growing up.
Rock and alternative music is what I usually listen to, so I was super excited to listen to the album. Personally, I think this album was a solid 8/10 and I already find a lot of the songs in my daily rotation. Rodrigo started off as just an average girl with a teenage dream, but now she is a global sensation who delivers hit after hit, and GUTS is a wonderful demonstration of that.
