‘GUTS:’ Olivia Rodrigo’s Incandescent Metamorphosis

With her sophomore album, Rodrigo has taken down romantic love from its lofty pedestal and traded it in for more philosophical musings.

My first real heartbreak took place when I was 17, by a boy whose greasy hair smelled like cigarettes and strawberries and who introduced me to what is still, to this day, my favorite sitcom. A week after we broke up, my mother rushed me to the ER after I complained of chest pain that wouldn’t go away. Like any teenager would, as they placed electrodes across my skin to draw out the shape of my heart’s beating, I wished that my illness would be severe enough for the boy to want me back. After many tests, the doctors ruled that I had a condition called costochondritis—an inflammation of my chest cartilage that back then, was believed to have been triggered by stress. Unable to contain my own sadness, my chest had cracked open to try and accommodate its sprawling and formidable shape, to give it a proper home even if it meant more suffering.

It would take years for a love to touch me so strongly that my heartbreak would once again feel like it was lurching out of my body in an attempt to take on a life of its own. For years, I’d write through that pain, never quite satisfied with my own accounts of what happened, always with a new way of thinking about what went wrong. There was always a new poem to write, a new angle from which to beat the sorry, dead horse of a finished love that still pulsed fervently for me. It might be the reason why when I heard Olivia Rodrigo’s “driver’s license,” followed by her debut album SOUR, that I felt such a kinship towards the teenage songstress. Circling the end of one particular relationship, SOUR’s deluge of passion, disbelief, and unabashed sorrow spoke to me on a crooning, cellular level. 

I don’t know what exactly I was expecting with the premiere of Rodrigo’s sophomore album GUTS. After the industry-breaking success of SOUR, the pressure for her to produce something even marginally comparable is a weight that I’m sure has kept her up at night, and that us fans have been silently holding over her head. Earlier this summer, with the release of the ballad “Vampire,” the now 20-year-old pop star seemingly proved that she still has the chops, with the unspoken promise that the full-length would similarly deliver.

Despite how bitingly “Vampire” arrived—with criminally damning accusations and sharp progressions to match—it feels obvious to me that the emotional center of GUTS isn’t actually the breakups that Rodrigo spends a good 5 songs (almost half of the album!) rehashing. The beauty of SOUR was its singular, obsessive heartbreak—one that was so thought-consuming and disastrous that it eventually became artistically productive. With each track on that first album, a new layer of the onion was peeled back, exposing a new dimension of Rodrigo’s inconceivable heartbreak, a different nerve ending exposed, another lesson learned. I remember listening to a podcast episode shortly after SOUR’s release in which the hosts marveled at the novelty of “happier” and its inherent caveat (“I hope you're happy, but don't be happier”), along with the nuance of “traitor” (“you didn't cheat, but you're still a traitor”). Back then, Rodrigo’s woeful, simmering love songs felt freshly revelatory, wise beyond their years.

With GUTS, we get tired revisitations of two potential break ups that are suspected to have inspired “Vampire,” with storytelling that feels more like a centrifuge than a nest egg. As Rodrigo recounts the transgressions of these (seemingly interchangeable) older exes who treated her poorly (seeing other girls, pushing on her insecurities), she runs herself dry spinning these man-children’s faults in a frenzy, only to keep landing in the same place: she can’t fix them. Without any nuance to her post-breakup realizations, Rodrigo herself seems unconvinced that these are loves worth writing about, leaving me unconvinced that these are loves worth hearing about. Unfixable “second string losers” are a dime a dozen, and very few are worth building half of a full-length album around. Some relationships really are just a “mesmerizing fucked up little thrill.”

But for all of the confusion and snark that proves lackluster when pointed outward to the Just Ken’s of the world, GUTS shines incandescently on the tracks where Rodrigo turns her reflections in on herself. As she sagely told journalist Jia Tolentino in an interview for Vogue, “heartbreak comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes.” Right now, it seems that above all, Rodrigo is grappling with the gargantuan anxieties that come with turning 20 while sitting atop the summit of stardom. Channeling Avril-esque production, Lana Del Rey melodrama, and yes, even a Swiftian country twang, Rodrigo walks us through what it’s like to be up against the impossible expectations of femininity (“all-american bitch”) and having to deal with the consequences of your potentially destructive and harmful actions (“making the bed”). And just like every starlet who spent their teenage years in the limelight, in “teenage dream,” Rodrigo is haunted by the public’s expectations, worried that the shape of fame won't bend to her inevitable evolutions, echoing the anxieties of Taylor Swift’s “Nothing New” feat. Phoebe Bridgers and Billie Eilish’s “Getting Older.” With GUTS, Rodrigo has taken down romantic love from its lofty pedestal and traded it in for more philosophical musings. 

Amidst these existential crises, what feels most endearing about GUTS is how much Rodrigo evidently had fun while writing it. No longer crying in her living room glued to the piano bench that gave us “driver’s license,” Rodrigo is ready to poke fun at the prospect of hooking up with your ex (“bad idea, right?”), being socially awkward, and finding out that your crush at a party actually plays for the other team (“ballad of a homeschool girl”). And with far more percussion than SOUR could’ve ever allowed, Rodrigo unleashes the nascent angst of “brutal” and “good 4 u” full throttle in GUTS, with most songs imbued with a vibe fit for the opening scene of any early aughts coming-of-age movie. Of all of her non-love songs, “lacy” has intrigued me the most—dissecting her own multilayered jealousy of another girl, Rodrigo reveals a different side of her vulnerability, one that she’s made to bear with a clenched jaw and a saccharine smile.

All day Friday, my phone lit up with friends’ reactions to GUTS, and we spent the day swapping theories, top threes, and favorite lines. In a voice message from Friday morning, one friend says with a laugh, “For one thing, this is a good reminder that I'm 26 years old.” I couldn’t agree more: The boy who broke my heart at 17 has a kid now, and this is the first time I'm thinking about him in years. And thank God for it. Almost a decade later, I know full well that there is so much life after and beyond any one heartbreak. With GUTS, Rodrigo seems to be slowly learning this lesson too, finding more dynamic and substantial artistic inspiration from other parts of her life, proving once and for all that there is none the wiser than a teenage girl.