"He said he's 6ft 2 and I'm like, 'Dude, nice try'." "The key to Rodrigo's songwriting is her ability to tell a great story in a way that feels like a conversation or as if you're reading her diary," says Daly, who also praises the singer for penning lyrics that capture "how people of her generation speak". "He had an ego and a temper and a wandering eye," Rodrigo deadpans drolly. She also displays her flair for a pithy lyric on Get Him Back, a hooky pop-rap track that sounds like a future single. When she repeatedly asks whether reconnecting with an ex is a "bad idea, right?" before swearing and saying "it's fine", it comes off as funny and relatable. The album's other trailer single, Bad Idea Right?, is driven by a chugging guitar riff that nods to the 1980s new wave era, but Rodrigo's vocal delivery is coolly contemporary. Rodrigo has said she was inspired by 1990s female artists "who aren't afraid to be angry and remorseful and like spiteful and snarling," you can definitely hear this when she crisply eviscerates an ex for "bleedin' me dry like a goddamn vampire". Guts has already signposted Rodrigo’s musical growth by yielding a transatlantic number one single, Vampire, which begins as a hushed piano ballad before building into a mini rock opera. The alt-rock-flavoured Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl offers a crisply unsentimental account of social awkwardness that draws from Rodrigo's own experience of homeschooling as a teenager. Consistently catchy and often stingingly witty, it demonstrates her range by blending deceptively delicate ballads including Lacy, in which Rodrigo eyes up a rival who's a "dazzling starlet, Bardot reincarnate", and retro-leaning guitar tunes. Out today, Rodrigo's second album Guts is comfortably among this year's most anticipated pop records. – Is it time to reconsider Britney Spears' legacy? – The return of Taylor Swift's seminal LP 1989 – Why Miley Cyrus is the ultimate 21st-Century star "Part of her appeal is that she gives you permission to feel everything and not to have to dilute anything, which is very necessary after the last few years," music writer Rhian Daly tells BBC Culture, pointing to our collective need for post-pandemic release. Her spiky, emotionally heightened pop-rock songs resonate not just with the singer's Gen Z peers, but older generations too. At just 20 years old, California-born Olivia Rodrigo is already a defining voice of the 2020s.
Every decade has its pre-eminent pop stars – from The Beatles in the 1960s to Madonna and Michael Jackson in the 1980s, and on to Taylor Swift in the 2010s.
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