[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cii6ruuycQA]
The thing that surprised people most about GUTS was not that it was good. People expected it to be good. What surprised them was the direction. Sour had been the breakout, the record that turned a Disney actress into a generational pop voice almost overnight. The temptation after something like Sour would be to consolidate, to make a version of the same album with higher production budgets and more carefully managed risks. Olivia Rodrigo went in the opposite direction. She got angrier, weirder, and more specific. The result was one of the best pop records in recent memory.
GUTS in 2023 turned the volume up on the rock instincts that were already present on Sour. The guitars are more central. The tempos are more aggressive. Vampire, the lead single, is a song about betrayal that builds to something close to a scream, and the dynamic range from its quiet opening to its full-band chorus is genuinely thrilling. It does not feel like someone who has been given more resources and decided to make something safer. It feels like someone who has been given more resources and decided to finally say what she has been holding.
The critical reception recognized something real: this was not a sophomore slump, the thing that fells so many young artists after an enormous debut. She arrived having already thought through what she wanted to say next. The sophomore record is often the one where the seams show because the artist is responding to the debut's reception rather than following the internal logic of their own development. Rodrigo appeared to be following the internal logic.
Sour itself deserves a closer look than it usually gets as a historical artifact. It arrived in 2021, the height of the pandemic's second year, and hit a nerve that went beyond its specific narrative of teenage heartbreak. The production, largely by Dan Nigro, is economical in a way that maximizes the emotional content: drums that feel live and immediate, guitar tones that sit in a late-nineties alternative register, a vocal production approach that keeps the voice centered and present without over-processing it. drivers license is a pop song that works because it refuses to rush the emotional payoff. The bridge arrives exactly when it should, and it earns everything it asks you to feel.
The pedigree matters contextually. She grew up on stage, in television, in an environment that could easily produce someone who is technically competent and emotionally managed. The fact that the music reads as emotionally unmanaged, as genuinely exposed, is itself an artistic achievement. It is not that the feelings are unprocessed. It is that the processing is visible in the work rather than hidden behind it. You can hear her working through something rather than presenting the conclusion.
The songwriter credits across both records show someone who is actively developing the craft rather than delegating it. She is in the room where the decisions happen. The idioms she reaches for, the lyrical move of the very specific detail that unlocks the general feeling, are already more confident on GUTS than on Sour. The line good 4 u opens with a familiar complaint and ends somewhere darker and more precise. The self-awareness is built into the structure.
The discourse around her is sometimes more interesting than the discourse around more overtly critical-darling artists because it has a larger blast radius. The teenage girl fanbase that has always been the engine of pop culture gets taken less seriously than it should. When she sells out stadiums and sweeps Grammy categories, the response in certain quarters still carries a mild surprise, as though volume of engagement implies shallowness of experience. The music argues otherwise. It argues that the things teenagers feel, which are not small things, deserve full artistic treatment, and she gives them that.
The question now is about trajectory rather than achievement. She is three albums in if you count the third wave of her development that came with the global touring cycle around GUTS and the creative restlessness that was visible in interviews from that period. The next record will either consolidate a sound or break with it again. The evidence of GUTS suggests she will break with it. The evidence of Sour suggests she will find something worth saying before she decides how to say it.
What she has already built is remarkable enough to anchor any assessment. A debut that genuinely moved people at scale. A follow-up that refused to play it safe. A live show reputation that puts her in a very short list of current pop acts who can headline festivals without the show feeling like an obligation. She is twenty years old and the work is still getting more interesting.
That is not a small thing. That is almost everything.
The Glastonbury 2025 set that circulated afterward showed the full scope of what she has built. The crowd size, the audience emotional investment, the way the songs translated from the specific to the collective: these are markers of something real. She was not playing to people who were there to see what the fuss was about. She was playing to people who knew every word and were there to be inside the music together. That relationship between artist and audience takes years to build and cannot be manufactured.
The discourse around her is sometimes more interesting than the discourse around more overtly critical-darling artists because it has a larger blast radius. When she sells out stadiums and sweeps Grammy categories, the response in certain quarters still carries a mild surprise. The music argues against that surprise. It argues that the things teenagers feel deserve full artistic treatment, and she gives them that.
She is twenty-two years old and the work is still getting more interesting. That is not a small thing. That is almost everything.
