The day has finally arrived. Olivia Rodrigo’s long-anticipated follow-up to 2021’s Sour is here. First announced two months ago, Guts was recorded with Sour producer Dan Nigro and features the already released singles “Vampire” and “Bad Idea Right?” Also, as Rodrigo talked about in a recent New York Times profile, she had Jack White and St. Vincent’s Annie Clark in her corner as mentors.
As is to be expected, Rodrigo is doing tons of good promo around GUTS. Jeni’s ice cream is doing an “Olivia Rodrigo Cone Takeover” this weekend where “we’re turning all of our Buttercrisp Waffle Cones a cool shade of purple to celebrate Olivia’s new album.” (There’s a Jeni’s up the street from where I live, so you best believe I will be partaking.)
In a chat with Apple Music, Rodrigo talked about some of the themes she explored on Guts:
I feel like when you’re making the album, you can’t really see the forest through the trees a little bit about what’s about or what you’re trying to get across. Sometimes you just wake up and go into the studio and see what comes out of you. In hindsight, I think that a lot of this album is about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be and who you want to hang out with and all of that stuff. I think that that’s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, is just that rising from that disillusionment.
She also talked about how she recorded about 25 songs while making the album, and that some tracks that didn’t make the final cut could be released at a later date. “I think some of them will definitely see the light of day,” Rodrigo said. “I don’t know. In crafting an album track list, there’s just intricacies. Like, oh, too many of these songs and I want to save this for later, and stuff like that. So I bet some of them will see the light of day.”
On Friday, Rodrigo will be on the Today show, and then of course she’s set to perform at the VMAs on Tuesday.
Listen to Guts in full below.
Guts is out now on Geffen.
