Olivia Rodrigo has been building her career for a while now, with TV shows such as Bizaardvark and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. But without a doubt, she established her persona in the music industry with her first album SOUR, making the release of her second one GUTS an exciting moment not only for her fans but also for the teen pop scene.
ALBUM CONCEPT
No need to be Olivia’s hardcore fan to know that purple is her signature color and it wouldn’t be different in this record. This time the color choice was a darker shade to show that she is still young but also has matured since her first record. She has said to Billboard that this album is about “failures and successes and making mistakes”, growing up essentially, and the transition from being a teenage girl to womanhood.
The name itself appeared to her during the make of the first album, with her liking the idea of a four-letter word having so many meanings and “just being an interesting word in general”, she said to Zane Lowe in an interview with Apple Music.
TRACKLIST
We all got to know the name of the tracks on August 2nd, with her releasing “vampire” on June 30th and “bad idea, right?” on August 11th, both as lead singles and with music videos. According to her she probably wrote about 100 to 150 songs, only finished writing and recording 20 of them, and chose 12 to put on the album. During live streams Olivia teased the fans by talking about the tracks even before we all got to know the names of the songs, referring to them as their track numbers. Even though she seems ultimately delighted with how her album turned out, track 1 (all-american bitch) is said to be her favorite. With her even saying that is the song she is most proud of writing in her life.
But other songs kept her fan base interested, specifically the last track called “teenage dream”. They even elaborate how this one could be an ode to SOUR or even being sampled with Rodrigo’s song “brutal” from her first album, due to this song having the famous line “I’m so sick of seventeen, where is my teenage dream?”.
SOUR CONTINUATION?
Because of many similarities between SOUR and GUTS, it came to speculation that one could be a continuation of the other. With Olivia collabing again with her first record producer Dan Nigro (Conan Gray, Caroline Polachek, Sky Ferreira), the fan theory just got bigger. For her fans the same color choice, same producer, and the name once again being a four-letter word in all caps wouldn’t be a coincidence. Given that she has not confirmed any theory about the similarities, everything will come clean only on September 8th with the debut of GUTS.
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The article above was edited by Giullia Cartaxo.
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