Olivia Rodrigo’s second album, Guts, released in September 2023, demonstrated that the trajectory established by Sour was not a one-time occurrence. The first album was remarkable for an artist who had not yet turned nineteen when it came out. The second is remarkable for demonstrating that the qualities that made the first album work were not accidental.

Rodrigo writes songs that sound like the feelings of being a teenager, but she writes them with a structural intelligence that most adult songwriters would find difficult to replicate. The anger in vampire and the specific self-consciousness of teenage dream are not presented with distance or irony. They are presented as what they are, and the lack of qualification is what makes them land.

The production, handled primarily by Dan Nigro, gives the songs space to breathe while maintaining the kind of sonic distinctiveness that makes an album feel like a coherent thing rather than a collection of tracks. Guts is louder and rockier than Sour in ways that reflect where Rodrigo was at twenty and not where she was at seventeen, and the progression feels natural.

The touring cycle that followed Guts was one of the larger productions of 2024, and the audience response confirmed that the commercial success of Sour was not a streaming anomaly. She has built something that functions at scale while maintaining the specific emotional register that made people care about the music in the first place. That combination is the hardest thing in pop music to sustain.