POP/ROCK

Olivia Rodrigo, "Guts"

When Rodrigo has big, messy feelings to process, she tends to do it behind the wheel. That's where she set "Drivers License," the smash breakup ballad that two years ago vaulted her from a teenage gig in the Disney universe to A-list pop stardom and a Grammy for best new artist. And now it's where she finds herself in "Making the Bed," a hazy lament on her knockout of a second album.

"Every night I wake up from this one recurring dream / I'm driving through the city and the brakes go out on me," she sings. In the dream she "can't stop at the red light" and "can't swerve off the road," which she diagnoses as a manifestation of her anxiety before she drops a couplet that perfectly crystallizes this emotional chaos: "I tell someone I love them just as a distraction / They tell me that they love me like I'm some tourist attraction." Yes, "Guts" is the inevitable what-hath-fame-wrought album from a 20-year-old star who was already pondering the wages of celebrity on 2021's "Sour."

"Sour" spun off the No. 1 singles in "Drivers License" and "Good 4 U" and brought plaudits from Billy Joel and Cardi B. But its enormous success invited an entirely different level of scrutiny, such that Rodrigo opens "Guts" with "All-American Bitch," an alternately wistful and punky song about the impossible balancing act she feels compelled to pull off as a woman entering young adulthood in the spotlight.

Other tunes describe punishing female beauty standards ("Pretty Isn't Pretty"), the quarter-life crisis of a fresh-faced prodigy ("Teenage Dream") and Rodrigo's general unpreparedness for Hollywood schmoozing ("Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl").

Rodrigo's most bitter discovery here is that, for all its perks, mega stardom turns out to be a real disruptor of one's ability to connect person-to-person. She intertwines her tales of social-professional disillusionment with stories of romantic betrayal. On "Vampire," the album's rock-operatic No. 1 single, she roasts an opportunist ex who lives in a "castle built off people you pretend to care about"; "Get Him Back!" has her plotting revenge against a preening rich guy who displays her like a trophy.

Rodrigo's flair for melodrama has grown only more vivid since her debut and so has her sense of humor. "Guts" really comes alive at its funniest, as in "Get Him Back!" and "Bad Idea Right?," both Gen Z dating satires.

There's more rock this time. Working again with producer Dan Nigro, Rodrigo pulls from emo, new wave, shoegaze, even Beastie Boys-style rap-rock. And her vocal phrasing is flexible enough to keep up with the changes.

Rodrigo's emotional presence is so strong throughout "Guts" — so believable even at its most unrelatable — that you never lose the sense of a specific young person navigating a trial of her own making.

MIKAEL WOOD, Los Angeles Times

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