GUTS by Olivia Rodrigo
Guts (stylized in all caps) is the second studio album by American singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo, released on September 8, 2023, via Geffen Records. It was written and recorded with Rodrigo working closely alongside Dan Nigro, the producer and multi-instrumentalist of her debut album Sour (2021). Inspired by the period of time immediately following Sour's success, Rodrigo conceived Guts hoping to reflect the process of maturity she experienced toward the end of her teenage years. A sonically diverse pop record with energetic songs and soft ballads, Guts experiments with more rock influences than its predecessor, utilizing a variety of guitar and drums sounds from older alternative and pop rock styles. The subject matter deals with Rodrigo's transition from adolescence to adulthood and its tribulations. Met with widespread acclaim from music critics, Guts was praised for Rodrigo's lyrical wit, complexity, and topicality as well as the overall music aesthetic and energy. Reviews noted both humorous and emotionally fraught lyrics in the album, detailing Rodrigo's struggles with identity, romantic and professional disillusionment, unexpected stardom, and societal expectations as a young woman. Commercially, it topped the album charts in 12 countries, including the United States, Australia, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Three singles were released from the album. The lead single, "Vampire", became a number-one hit in the US and several other countries, followed by "Bad Idea Right?" and "Get Him Back!", which reached the top 10 internationally. To further support the album, Rodrigo will embark on the Guts World Tour in 2024. Background On May 21, 2021, Olivia Rodrigo released her debut studio album, Sour, to huge commercial success. Produced by Dan Nigro, it became the most-streamed album of 2021 and won Rodrigo three Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist. She embarked on the Sour Tour, which consisted of 48 shows across North America and Europe, in spring 2022. In August 2021, Rodrigo surmised that her upcoming record would probably "be a lot happier" than her debut. Talking to Billboard in February 2022, she confirmed Nigro will return as producer and she had a title and "a few songs" ready. Rodrigo aimed to "get as much done as possible" before embarking on the Sour Tour. In late 2022, while revealing her Spotify Wrapped, she confirmed that new music was underway. On January 8, 2023, she posted a clip which featured a piano-driven track on her Instagram. In early June 2023, Rodrigo's website was updated with a countdown that was set to end on June 30, a date she had also teased in late May. On June 13, Rodrigo officially announced the album's lead single "Vampire", slated for release on June 30, and revealed the single cover. On June 20, she revealed another Easter egg by leaving her fans a voicemail greeting, which turned out to be the first preview of "Vampire" and played a piano-driven instrumental. On June 26, 2023, her webstore revealed the official album title, Guts, and its release date. Following this, Rodrigo posted the artwork and officially announced the album on social media. Writing and recording In a statement, Rodrigo shared that the album is about "growing pains" and figuring out her identity at this point in her life. She stated "I feel like I grew 10 years between the ages of 18 and 20", and described it as a natural part of "growth", and hoped to reflect that with the record. Rodrigo recorded Guts while experiencing "lots of confusion, mistakes, awkwardness & good old fashioned teen angst". Described by her as a "time capsule", the record contains "wrenching, cinematic" ballads and "playful and insouciant" songs, according to Vogue. Rodrigo abstained from songwriting for six months following Sour's release, so that she could "live a life in order to be able to write about it". Work on the album concluded about a week before "Vampire" was released. In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, Rodrigo revealed she had the title in mind since the time she was making Sour. It was influenced by the "interesting contexts" she noticed people use it in: "spill your guts, hate your guts". Music Guts features a sonically diverse range of tracks, from delicate ballads like "Lacy" to retro-inspired guitar-driven tunes such as "Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl". Rodrigo's collaboration with Nigro played a significant role in the album's development, providing constructive feedback and contributing to its overall sound. According to The A.V. Club, Guts offers a mix of nostalgic and contemporary music elements, helping in the album's appeal with a wide audience. Rock music plays a larger role here than on Rodrigo's first album. She expands particularly on the aggressive songs and alternative rock sounds demonstrated briefly on Sour, with elements from emo, new wave, shoegaze, and rap rock used on different songs here. As Los Angeles Times lead critic Mikael Wood writes, Rodrigo and Nigro are shown "switching up guitar tones and drum sounds to give each track a distinct signature". Rolling Stone journalist Brian Hiatt and Vulture writer Craig Jenkins both regard Guts as a rock album and argue that such a strong direction into the genre is uncommon for a major pop artist like Rodrigo. In another comparison to Sour, The A.V. Club identifies much older sources of inspiration behind Guts, particularly the grunge and pop-rock sounds of the 1990s and early 2000s. Along with grunge and new wave, Jenkins names power pop among the stylistic tactics behind the album's sentimental ballads and alternative rockers. Echoing this, Will Hodgkinson of The Times says that the album alternates "between heartfelt balladry and raucous indie rock". "Vampire", which begins as a hushed piano ballad, intensifies into a rock opera.
As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn't sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I'd just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s <i>SOUR</i>—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license”, you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on <i>SNL</i> in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo <i>arrived</i>. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realisation: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That's my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, <i>GUTS</i> is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch”, which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If <i>SOUR</i> was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, <i>GUTS</i> finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn't always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed”, bereft of good answers on “logical”, in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream”. Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge”, gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that's probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from <i>GUTS</i>. <b>“all-american bitch”</b> “It's one of my favourite songs I've ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I've been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” <b>“vampire”</b> “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of [2022]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I've just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favourite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” <b>“get him back!”</b> “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn't like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can't write songs. I'm so bad at this. I don't want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’. Just goes to show you: Never give up.” <b>“teenage dream”</b> “Ironically, that's actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don't?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it's also a question mark and it's leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It's still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”
