Instead of the imbalanced romance that “Vampire” seems clearly about on the surface, a lot of online chatter has been devoted all summer to the proposition that it’s actually about Taylor Swift. She acknowledges the oddity of her position here and there, for instance when she calls the guy in “ Vampire” not only a “bloodsucker” but a “fame-fucker.” But it doesn’t obstruct the more universal experiences and emotions the songs are about.Īt least, unless you want it to. Wisely, Rodrigo doesn’t narrow her focus by dwelling too much on the ordeals of adjusting to celebrity, as too many post-fame records do, or taking shots at gossips, critics, or rivals. Combine that with her avowed love for Billy Joel and Carole King, and it’s just the kind of wide-ranging, spongelike listening that’s to be applauded in an artist at Rodrigo’s stage, though not everybody’s lawyers would agree. The seeds of the spoken-sung conversational vocals Rodrigo frequently uses here come from many places, including Swift, but at their most sardonic, as on “Bad Idea,” they feel an awful lot like last year’s breakout post-punk U.K.

The interweaving guitar and bass riffs on songs like “Bad Idea Right?” instantly call to mind the Breeders, for example, and her and Nigro’s penchant for building song structures around dynamic shifts can’t help but recall the famous “LOUD-quiet-LOUD” stylings of Kim Deal’s other band, the Pixies. Rodrigo was already at home with such pop-punk gestures on Sour, but the rock songs on Guts also draw on the more sophisticated, artsier sounds of post-punk and indie artists from the 1980s and ’90s-apparently a taste inherited from her parents-through to today. It’s echoed musically by the song’s alternation between hushed rapid-fire recitative verses and expansive cheerleader-chant choruses, which bring to mind Gwen Stefani or Avril Lavigne. Maybe the purest example of her approach is on “Get Him Back!,” where she plays the two meanings of the title phrase off each other to explore the simultaneous impulses to reunite with a lousy boyfriend and to take her revenge: “I wanna key his car/ I wanna make him lunch … I wanna kiss his face/ With an uppercut/ I wanna meet his mom/ Just to tell her her son sucks.” Such self-aware ambivalence was less within her reach on the debut album, let alone with such good jokes. On the song’s outro, she squeezes in a last pair of comic examples of her purported gaucheness-“Thought your mom was your wife, ah-ah/ Called you the wrong name twice, ah-ah”-before throwing up her hands in mock exasperation, “Can’t think of a third line/ La-la-la-la-la-la.” She both laments and lampoons that off-road voyage on the post-punk-styled Guts track “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” portraying herself as undersocialized: “I made it weird, I made it worse/ Each time I step outside, it’s social suicide,” she confesses.

In fact, she’d probably be commencing her second year at Columbia alongside her close friend Madison Hu, her co-star in the mid-2010s Disney Channel sitcom Bizaardvark, the show (along with High School Musical: The Musical: The Series) that ensured that Rodrigo also would never attend a regular high school. She’d be heading back to campus this week instead of sending out the album’s follow-up, Guts. I’m not sure how it became a trope to call second albums “sophomore.” But if Olivia Rodrigo’s debut, Sour, hadn’t become one of the biggest releases of 2021, winning her a Grammy for best new artist and putting the kibosh on her post–high school plans, the 20-year-old might be a literal sophomore now.

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