I don’t find out about you, however I’m feeling LP2.

On GUTS, her sophomore album out at the moment, the younger celebrity Olivia Rodrigo will get a lot rawer and messier than her childhood hero Taylor Swift ever did — therefore a title designed to evoke each gritty resolve and the spilling of 1’s innermost secrets and techniques. However all through the document, Rodrigo harnesses the spirit of “22,” the Pink single about younger ladies spending “depressing and magical” nights in town, “pleased, free, confused, and lonely on the identical time.” On this case, these sentiments are sometimes funneled into risky rock songs impressed by the MTV pop-rock hits of the ’90s and 2000s, a pantheon of Rodrigo inspirations-turned-pals that runs from Alanis to Avril. Sure, she nonetheless sings ballads, too. Nevertheless it speaks volumes {that a} commenter on this web site not too long ago wrote that the brand new Model Pussy music gave the impression of Olivia Rodrigo and meant it as a praise.

Rodrigo’s 2021 debut album SOUR made her the most important breakout pop star of the last decade to this point. The album was thrilling for rock followers, who noticed in Rodrigo a kindred spirit, and for pop followers that welcomed her as a contemporary and vibrant presence. Whether or not channeling Paramore on “good 4 u,” borrowing a Radiohead riff on “deja vu,” or reflecting again Phoebe Bridgers and Lorde on her record-breaking debut single “drivers license,” she got here off as a younger expertise with good style and her personal standpoint. She had the poise and polish you’d count on from a toddler actor, however Rodrigo diverged from the trail of previous Disney Channel stars in a means that gained her the mutual admiration of heroes like Jack White, Annie Clark, and Kathleen Hanna. The album was slowed down by too many weepy laments, however — buoyed by the mixture of Rodrigo’s instincts and producer Dan Nigro’s expertise — it felt like an on the spot traditional regardless of its flaws.

The brand new document leans into Rodrigo’s strengths increasingly more. As on SOUR, she spends a lot of GUTS singing about breakups, betrayals, and unfair expectations. This time, although, she appears to be having a lot enjoyable chronicling these travails. The final music Rodrigo and Nigro wrote for SOUR was “brutal,” the album’s explosive and discordant opening monitor. GUTS typically faucets again into that music’s livewire power, leading to a stack of wildly entertaining singles-in-waiting. Even the saddest, most straight-faced tracks on the album are a step up from SOUR, including depth and nuance to what might have been boilerplate sluggish jams. However the extra unhinged Rodrigo permits herself to get, the brighter she shines.

To wit: She raps. She raps, and it isn’t even near a catastrophe. On spotlight “get him again!,” over a monitor that’s half “So Whatcha Need” and half “Steal My Sunshine,” Rodrigo vacillates between competing urges for reconciliation and revenge, toggling between two meanings of the phrase as she nimbly rides the beat. In verse one, she introduces her poisonous, magnetic foil: “He had an ego and a mood and a wandering eye/ He stated he’s six-foot-two and I’m like, dude, good strive.” She’s not above portray herself as pathetic, too: “Yeah, I pour my little coronary heart out, however as I’m hitting ship/ I image all of the faces of my disillusioned associates.” When she switches again to singing on the bridge, we get extra eminently quotable bars, from “I wish to key his automobile/ I wish to make him lunch” to “I wish to meet his mother/ Simply to inform her her son sucks!” Gluing all this collectively is an enormous shout-along refrain like Sleigh Bells channeling “We Are By no means Ever Getting Again Collectively.” It’s the album’s least predictable zag and its most evident potential hit.

You already heard Rodrigo doing a speak-sing factor on “unhealthy concept proper?,” the giddily chaotic advance monitor that snapped like Elastica. That one’s additionally about her irrepressible want to fall again into an ex-boyfriend’s mattress, filled with spoken asides and quips that talk to Rodrigo’s peerless line studying: the whispered, resigned “Fuck it, it’s high quality,” but additionally the shit-eating grin you’ll be able to hear when she declares, “And I’m certain I’ve seen a lot hotter males/ However I actually can’t bear in mind when.” All of the whereas, driving bass, drums, and guitar brilliantly mirror the narrative — build up strain till an insufferable breaking level, then exploding into short-term euphoria.

Songs like these are thrilling for the way in which they explode with power and concepts, Trojan-horsing unruly rock music into the pop mainstream in a means that feels pure, not focus-grouped. They make “good 4 u” really feel tame by comparability. Simply as importantly, they symbolize Rodrigo rising up as a lyricist, shifting previous the single-minded wallowing of SOUR right into a extra advanced, much less melodramatic frame of mind. Her debut was relatable as a result of overblown teenage heartbreak is a common ceremony of passage, however it’s refreshing to listen to her mature past self-pity. Even the impassioned piano ballads that come near SOUR redux are likely to mood Rodrigo’s anger and misery with a bit extra self-awareness. On “logical,” after logging her former companion’s many sins, she takes possession of her personal errors: “I do know I’m half accountable/ And that makes me really feel horrible.” On “the grudge,” she a minimum of considers the potential of advancing past her despair: “It takes power to forgive, however/ I’m not fairly certain I’m there but.”

Not each quiet one lands. The whispery, glittering “lacy,” about Rodrigo being undermined and mistreated by somebody she worships, loses me on the opening line about “pores and skin like puff pastry” and by no means fairly recovers. The songs about grappling with the lack of a traditional adolescence (“making the mattress”) and the crushing expectations of fame (the ingeniously titled nearer “teenage dream”) are robust to attach with, however the preparations are stellar, and Rodrigo’s efficiency is compelling. It’s way more thrilling when lead single “vampire” morphs from customary Rodrigo sad-girl fare right into a disco-rock anthem match for the Broadway stage, like “I Will Survive” crossed with “Bat Out Of Hell.” It’s straightforward to think about the hokey therapy they may have utilized to “fairly isn’t fairly,” Rodrigo’s treatise on the wrestle with unimaginable magnificence requirements, however the music advantages immeasurably from a fast-gliding association that would nearly cross for Phoenix.

If Rodrigo excels when her unhappy songs get a jolt of electrical energy, she’s mainly invincible when she correctly wilds out. Fortuitously, GUTS is filled with songs that spike her damaging feelings with biting wit and winsome goofiness. She makes so many expressive tweaks to her voice, breaking into quirky affectations on the driving, Alvvays-esque “love is embarrassing” and outright screaming on the peak of “all-american bitch,” the album’s brash and cheeky opening monitor. And whereas she nonetheless wails away on her scorned-lover tracks in a means that may really feel a bit overblown, she sounds phenomenal letting her voice edge as much as a scream amidst the anxious jubilation of “ballad of a homeschooled woman”: “Every time I step exterior/ It’s social suicide!”

She nonetheless instructions an enormous viewers that will be the envy of most artists, however — like her rapid predecessor Billie Eilish — in following her muse, it’s doable Rodrigo has opted out of the Sizzling 100 domination she loved on SOUR to grow to be extra of an album artist. After debuting at #1 partially resulting from holdover curiosity from the final LP, “vampire” primarily vanished from the zeitgeist like Dracula uncovered to daylight. The transcendent “unhealthy concept proper?” by no means got here near topping the chart. Partially that’s as a result of the bedroom-pop and pop-punk moments that album embodied have given technique to an period of crossover nation hegemony. Additionally, there’s functionally not a lot distinction between GUTS and no matter’s developing the expensive-publicist indie-rock pipeline, and that form of music lends itself to sustainable longevity greater than world-conquering smash hits. I’m undecided if there’s one other “drivers license”-level cultural phenomenon on GUTS, and there doesn’t have to be. From begin to end, it’s a extra completed, adventurous album than SOUR, one which has me excited to comply with Rodrigo’s profession for the lengthy haul. “I concern that they already bought all one of the best components of me,” Rodrigo sings within the new album’s last moments. She doesn’t want to fret about that, however she will be able to be happy to freak out about it if her neuroses are going to maintain spilling over into music this emphatically alive.