Olivia Rodrigo’s second album, the follow-up to her 2021 breakthrough Sour, is called Guts.
Photo by Nick Walker/Courtesy of the artist/Illustration by Jackie Lay/NPR
For any young person, the handful of years that compose the transition from teen to young adult are bound to be awkward and emotionally fraught, even if they’re a little exciting too. For Olivia Rodrigo, those gap years have been stranger than most, after the explosive success of her first album, Sour, turned an 18-year-old songwriter into much more: the youngest artist to ever debut at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, a three-time Grammy winner, billion-plus streaming sensation, Vogue cover girl and the artist The New York Times dubbed “pop’s brightest new hope.” All of which meant that her second album would, too, be more than an album: Whatever she delivered next would be her response to the discovery of her own talent, her relationship with success and, perhaps above all, a brand-new kind of pressure.
“I definitely had a chip on my shoulder the whole time. I remember for the first few months of sitting down and trying to write the album, I had all of these intrusive thoughts in my head: I would sit down at the piano and just think about what people would say, how people would criticize it,” Rodrigo says. “Maybe halfway through making the record, I kind of had to shift my perspective into trying to write songs that I enjoy, trying to write songs that I would like to hear on the radio — not trying to beat what I did last time or please anyone. And that’s sort of where the real magic happened.”
That album, Guts, arrived earlier this month, and is by any measure another success, debuting once again at No. 1….
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