“GUTS FEELS INDEBTED TO A SNARLY HOLLYWOOD VERSION OF PUNK
10 Olivia Rodrigo
Guts
Olivia Rodrigo imagines punk as it seemed when you were a kid: loud, angry, melodic – the kind of music that Lindsay Lohan played in Freaky Friday.
Rodrigo’s firecracker second album, Guts, draws from beloved pop-rock both classic and contemporary, but it feels most indebted to this Hollywood version of punk, which somehow seemed snarlier and snarkier than anything that existed in the real world.
Unlike her one-time mentor Taylor Swift, romance is not life-or-death in Rodrigo’s world, but losing a friend, or losing your sense of self, might be. Guys, on the other hand, are just grist to the mill: Get Him Back!, Guts’s galvanising peak, is destined to close Rodrigo’s live show for as long as she lives. It’s Guts to a T: toxic, messy and a total headrush. Shaad D’Souza
9 Amaarae
Fountain Baby
When the Ghanaian-American singer, songwriter and producer Amaarae emerged internationally from west Africa’s alté scene in 2020, she told Pitchfork: “I want to be the quintessential African princess of pop.” This year, ahead of the release of Fountain Baby, her second record, she had upgraded her ambitions, stating: “Fountain Baby is a pop album above all else. It should not be pigeonholed solely as an ‘Afrobeats’ project.”
As promised, Fountain Baby is a lavish and playful album with a borderless vision shaped by Amaarae’s upbringing between Accra and Atlanta: yes, there are the sleek percussive elements of Afrobeats, along with the euphoric boundlessness of alté, but Amaarae’s experimentation also takes in punk, R&B, flamenco, melodic rap, g-funk, soft rock, all topped off with her sugar-sweet voice.
The abundance of Fountain Baby is an act of generosity, strapping in the listener
