After depriving fans of new releases for the past two years, Olivia Rodrigo has finally back with her new album “GUTS”.
Rodrigo started her career as a child actor starring in Disney shows “Bizaardvark” and “High School Musical: The Musical the Series”. Despite the fame she gained from acting, it was her debut album “Sour” in 2021, that solidified her spot in the music industry.
Her debut single, “drivers license” hit No. 1 on Billboard within a week of its release and currently has more than 1.9 billion streams on Spotify. It also won “Best Pop Solo Performance” at the 2022 Grammy Awards.
Her success didn’t end there. Three other songs from the same album, “good 4 u”, “traitor”, and “deja vu” gained more than one billion streams on Spotify. “Sour” won three Grammys, an insane amount of fame for a teen’s debut album.
She didn’t earn this fame from just pure luck. Rodrigo’s youth allows her to connect with her teen audience in ways older songwriters can’t.
Her songs about heartache appealed to teenagers so much that a trend was started on TikTok where girls would ask their significant others to break up with them for an hour just so they could listen to Rodigo’s “Sour” album with a new sense of appreciation.
Her relatability is part of the reason why fans were ecstatic to hear about her next release.
Rodrigo announced her second album in an Instagram post on June 26 with the caption reading, “My sophomore album GUTS comes out September 8th.” Her post immediately attracted a lot of attention, with millions of likes and thousands of comments expressing how excited they were for her album.
Four days after the announcement of her album, her song “vampire” was officially released as a lead single. This powerful song about manipulation and being used instantly claimed the top spot on the US Billboard Top 100. Personally, I connected with the song a lot, and even shed a few tears.
She won a well deserved VMA this year for “vampire” in the category “Best Editing”.
The line “Cause girls your age know better” represents how naive and trusting she was toward someone who hurt her.
Rodrigo also uses this line to hint at a big age gap between her and her ex, as she was just 19 while writing this song. After all, “GUTS” wouldn’t be a true Olivia Rodrigo album without some trashtalking about exes.
The last two songs in the tracklist “pretty isn’t pretty” and “teenage dream” are some of the most relatable on her whole album. The two songs deeply connect with beauty standards toward young girls, emphasizing how society’s standards ruin girls’ self image.
The song “pretty isn’t pretty” dives into how everywhere she looks, she always finds someone better looking, no matter how hard she tries to make herself prettier. She highlights this in the lines “But I’d always feel the same, ‘cause pretty isn’t pretty enough”.
In the beginning of Rodrigo’s song “teenage dream” she explains how she understands that reaching adulthood means she has to step out of the shelter of being a teenager. The lines, “Yeah they all say that it gets better, it gets better but what if I don’t?” represents that she still views the future with caution despite others’ reassurements.
“I made the bulk of this album during my 19th year on this earth. A year that, for me, was filled with lots of confusion, mistakes, awkwardness & good old fashioned teen angst,” Rodrigo wrote on Instagram.
Five days after the album’s release, Rodrigo announced her Guts World Tour. This isn’t her first tour, as her world tour announcement for “Sour” attracted lots of attention as well.
She made standard ticket prices for her debut album very low compared to other artists’ concert tickets, ranging from $50 to $200 because she wanted tickets to be affordable for her fans.
But a problem surfaced when people who weren’t fans bought tickets early and then put them on secondary markets for thousands of dollars. Many fans also shared their disappointment when they found out Rodrigo is touring in only America and Europe.
Rodrigo reassured fans, saying there will be more concert dates to be released soon.
The Grammy winner impressed fans yet again, completely spilling her guts out in her new album.
