In “all-american bitch,” the dynamic opening track of twenty-year-old pop phenom Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album GUTS, the former Disney Channel sneers to the listener that “I know my age, and I act like it.” It’s a line that sums up what I find both refreshing and vexing about Rodrigo’s music – namely, that it is unabashedly teenaged. 

On SOUR, her Grammy-nominated debut, this adolescence most often resulted in weepy ballads like “drivers license,” whose melodrama I found tedious and juvenile, and who’s classification as “bedroom pop” I found insulting to artists who actually record music in their bedrooms. But sometimes it resulted in “brutal,” SOUR’s unabashedly angsty opener that pulled liberally from 90s alt-rock and 2000s pop-punk. As someone whose teenaged contemporaries either conformed to a kind of bland politeness (Taylor Swift), recorded vanilla music but went through a public trainwreck phase (Justin Bieber), or deliberately but ineffectively tried to provoke the public (Miley Cyrus), it was refreshing to hear an actual teenager ask some confrontational questions about her youth and status as a child star. “Who am I, if not exploited?” “Where’s my fucking teenaged dream?” “All I did was try my best”/”This the kind of thanks I get?” Sure, she looks like a prom queen, but on SOUR Rodrigo proved that she was capable of sounding as jaded and frustrated as every non-famous teenager in America, resulting in far more convincing and exciting music than Bieber’s or Ariana Grande’s attempts at becoming mature R&B stars.

But the irony of Rodrigo claiming to act her age is that, from a sonic soundpoint, GUTS sounds totally out of step with most of her pop contemporaries. Those 90s/00s influences that occasionally popped up on SOUR? They’re most of the album now – the guitars far out number the synths, and the scream to swooning vocals ratio is much more even. In a pop landscape where “mainstream rock” has become an oxymoron, Rodrigo has recorded a mainstream rock album that mostly steers clear of the rap and R&B elements embraced by even rock-adjacent stars like Swift and Billie Eilish – no small feat for someone who, just two years ago, was still a regular cast member of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. It’s not a perfect album, but it has a clear enough conception of what it wants to accomplish that it makes me wonder if it represents both the start and the end of something – a kind of jolt to the charts that will wake modern music up from its interpolation and TikTok-induced slumber.

What’s Old Is New Again

Of course, the idea that a Gen Z pop star would embrace the music of Gen X and Millennials won’t be shocking to anyone who’s paid attention to what’s been going on in indie rock over the past ten years. In the middle of the 2010s, after the garage rock and post-punk revivals fizzled out, electro-influenced acts like MGMT ran out of new ideas, and everyone came to their senses and got tired of Mumford & Sons style stomp-and-clap folk, a host of 90s-influenced bands burst onto the scene, pulling liberally from artists that made their mark after the post-Nevermind alt rock explosion. Slightly more esoteric 90s bands like Pavement and Built to Spill could already be heard in groups like Speedy Ortiz and Parquet Courts, and Elliott Smith more or less invented the sad girl and boy songwriters like Alex G and Phoebe Bridgers, but pretty soon groups like Bully and Charly Bliss began pulling directly from acts like Nirvana and Green Day, “obvious” choices that may have been dismissed as passé only five years earlier.

As the 2010s drew to a close, the alt rock mega stars of yesteryear could be heard all over (primarily American) indie rock, from Wednesday to Jay Som to Snail Mail, who’s frontwoman Lindsay Jordan was literally taught to play guitar by Helium frontwoman Mary Timony. At roughly the same time, pop and rap began to look back nostalgically at the pop-punk and emo-pop that dominated the airwaves of the early 2000s, so much so that the phrase “emo-rap” was coined not just as a label for a dark and morose style of hip-hop, but also for rappers who literally sampled emo bands like Brand New in their music. Real-life tragedy cut the emo-rap trend short, as genre leaders Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, and Juice WRLD all died prematurely, but their innovations set the stage for much shallower attempts to merge hip-hop with Hot Topic-style mall punk. One-time Eminem wannabe Machine Gun Kelly reinvented himself as a Tom DeLonge wannabe with 2020’s Tickets to My Downfall, while Willow Smith (performing mononymously and in lower-case as willow) tried her hand at emo revivalism with 2021’s lately I feel EVERYTHING and 2022’s <COPINGMECHANISM>, and the two would collaborate on “emo girl,” which turned the subtext of their solo projects into an unlistenable headline. Even some indie adjacent projects began to lean too heavily on the crutch of nostalgia, with acts like beabadobee and Beach Bunny turning out competent-yet-bland music that recalled the Clinton-era, but without the vision displayed by many of their contemporaries. 

One could even argue that “good 4 u” – the SOUR track that borrows so heavily from Paramore’s “Misery Business” that Haley Williams and Josh Farro were given songwriting credits after the song’s release, and whose promotional artwork eerily echoed that of fellow 90s-aping act Pom Pom Squad – was another lowpoint in the mall punk nostalgia trend. But while GUTS features better Rodrigo-penned rock songs, “good 4 u” does deserve some credit for what it doesn’t do, which is oafishly flaunt its influences the way that “emo girl” does. It sounds a lot like Paramore, sure, but it doesn’t sound like someone begging and pleading thirty-something Paramore fans to care about them – it sounds like a teenager writing music that sounds like music that was written by other teenagers, all while exploring similar adolescent themes. The influence is clear, but it doesn’t feel like a marketing exercise. It feels like she’s come to this kind of music honestly. 

Pop for the People

Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’m getting played, that Rodrigo’s Veruca Salt covers and professed fandom of Rage Against the Machine is all a ploy to grab the ears of both Gen Z and their Gen X parents, and that this millennial indie rock fan has been accidentally swept up in it in the way a tuna net accidentally captures a crab. But I also have to believe what my ears are telling me, and what they’re telling me is that GUTS is a damn good record, that Rodrigo means the things she’s saying and the music she’s playing, and that she’s created what could wind up being the pop apotheosis of this alt-rock nostalgia trend. Will anybody be mistaking it for a Hole or Bikini Kill record anytime soon? Probably not – but this isn’t an album that pulls its punches and treats rock like a costume to put on, either. Take out the rapped second verse of “ballad of a homeschooled girl” and you get the, uh, guts of a pure rock song – springy bubblegrunge guitars, a rollicking drum beat, and distortion that lingers after the last sung line.

Hook the people behind projects like Momma and illuminati hotties up to a polygraph and I’m sure they’d eventually confess that it’s the kind of “pop” song they wish they could write and ride to chart success. Do the same to Phoebe Bridgers and I’m sure she’d say the same about “lacy,” an acoustic ballad of feminine envy that multitracks Rodrigo’s vocals to make it sound like she has her own version of boygenius accompanying her. I don’t know that I’ll ever like these songs better than those of the indie and alternative artists that Rodrigo is modeling them after – but I also can’t help but be impressed by her and co-writer/producer Dan Nigro’s ability to take these sounds and reformat them for mainstream pop listeners, something that’s a testament not only to their skill, but to their good taste as well. 

It seems to afford them a bit of freedom as well, both from a musical perspective and an image perspective. Modern pop music is a genre that demands perfection of its performers. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé aren’t people, they’re goddesses, so important that USA Today created positions to cover them and their fanbases. While they’re still both capable of creating great music (see: RENAISSANCE), as a listener, I find this requirement of perfection to be alienating. The best music should invite us in and let us feel like we can participate along with the musician – instead, many modern pop songs are pleas for adulation, and the possibility of losing that adulation disincentivizes artists from taking risks. Rodrigo is a celebrity with a carefully curated image, but as a musician, her songs are much more egalitarian – you’ll never be able to recreate what Beyoncé did in Homecoming, but you could skip across the stage the way Rodrigo did at the VMAs while performing “want him back!” You’ll also probably never be able to work with Aaron Dessner or Jack Antonoff like Taylor Swift does, but you might be able to pick up a guitar and a pedal and try and recreate the guitar tone from your mom’s Cure albums the way Rodrigo does on “pretty isn’t pretty.” 

For the past four years or so, I’ve been writing essays begging and pleading for someone to shake up the musical landscape – and in those four years, things have only gotten worse for pop. Original ideas have given way to a plague of interpolation, some of the leading lights of the 2010s have either become self-parodies or lost their minds, and hip-hop, which provided pop music with a bit of an edge, has moved past its imperial phase both creatively and commercially. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve fallen for GUTS, and that I’ve convinced myself that it could be the record that shatters the sorry pop status quo and rings in a new era in which my beloved rock music reclaims its once vaunted place in mainstream culture. 

If history is any indication, I’ll be disappointed again – Rodrigo could always pivot away from rock, or her guitar heavy songs could fail to chart. But the day I started writing this article, Rodrigo announced that she was bringing The Breeders on tour with her – which means that at every show she plays, some Zoomer will hear “Cannonball” for the first time and love it. And then they’ll want to find out more about Kim Deal. And then they’ll listen to the Pixies for the first time. And then they’ll learn about the bands the Pixies inspired, and the bands who inspired the Pixies. And then maybe, just maybe, they’ll want to start a band of their own. If that pattern repeats itself among even a handful of kids, GUTS’ backward looking sound, and all the nostalgists who preceded it, will have been worth it.