![]() ![]() I cannot overstate how much I needed a voice like hers when I was a teenager, listening to rock music that blamed The Girl for everything, and that sometimes even indulged in violent revenge fantasies about her, always figuring her as the object and never the subject. Something particular I appreciate about Rodrigo’s music is the way it pulls from a lot of genres that have historically been male-dominated - pop-punk, emo, angsty alt-rock - and enlivens them with the vivid perspective of an idiosyncratic young woman. And both, I can now say, made awesome second albums. Both musicians are former teen phenoms who returned to the spotlight at age 20. ![]() Listening to “Guts” for the first time reminded me of when I initially heard Lorde’s great 2017 sophomore album, “Melodrama.” The albums don’t sound much alike - Rodrigo gravitates more toward rock aesthetics - but both feel like thrilling fulfillments of potential, two distinct artists staying true to what made them special while expanding the scope of their perspectives and ambitions. Rodrigo’s sophomore album, “Guts,” is finally out today, and I am here to report some good news: It’s a diamond. As the Amplifier’s very own editor, Caryn Ganz, wrote in a recent profile of Rodrigo, “crafting the follow-up to a smash debut is music’s most daunting crucible, and Rodrigo felt the pressure to make a diamond.” “Sour” felt as if it were signaling the sudden arrival of a major talent - and those are often the trickiest albums to follow up. In a review I wrote at the time, I noted that “Rodrigo’s songs have lived-in details to spare, as though she had all this time been assembling a detailed dossier on the emotional minutiae of the teenage experience.” In May 2021, Olivia Rodrigo, then 18 years old, released her debut album, “Sour.” Earlier that year, the singer-songwriter had become an overnight sensation with her heart-tugging, piano-driven ballad “Drivers License,” but “Sour” proved that there was so much more to her than that: She could also pull off dreamy alt-rock ( “Deja Vu”), spiky pop-punk ( “Good 4 U”) and sharp social commentary ( “Jealousy, Jealousy”). ![]()
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