Olivia Rodrigo gave no indication that she was going to have difficulty following up her sensational debut album, Sour. Surely, it would have been understandable had she been taken a little aback by the surge of commercial and critical success that greeted her first album. Many a mighty artist has been flummoxed when charged with making their next musical statement when a smash is clearly visible in the rearview mirror. Through the shooting-star trajectory of her last couple years, Rodrigo has been resolutely assured as she took a radiant victory tour that included the likes of hopping onto the Madison Square Garden stage with Billy Joel (notably namechecked in Rodrigo’s hit “Deja Vu”) and gleefully, profanely raging against the U.S. Supreme Court’s misogynistic trashing of precedent with Lily Allen by her side. The star turn never ended.

On her sophomore release, Guts, Rodrigo keeps the giddy whirlwind spinning. In most respects, she offers up the same sort of brash, boisterous pop-rock. The music is built on thick, potent hooks, and the lyrics a tinged with the burning-on-the-surface emotions of teenaged living. There are tiara tips to her status as a A-list celebrity, such as the venomous insult of a problematic paramour as a “starfucker” in the spectacular lead single “Vampire,” but she keeps it tethered to all-girls-are-queens sensibility that keeps the songs relatable. In the anthemic roars, it often feels less like she’s provoking a singalong and more like she’s simply joining in with a primal-scream choir of young womanhood.

Working again with Dan Nigro, who produced the album and is credited cowriter on all of its tracks, Rodrigo further establishes her bona fides as as a crackling good crafter of pop songs. She dances with the spirits of her predecessors, whether going full Avril on “All-American Bitch” or demonstrating what it might have sounded like if Kelly Clarkson had kept building on her “Since U Been Gone” glory with “Love Is Embarrassing.” The rap-adjacent “Get Him Back!” is like Gwen Stefani reincarnated as Beastie Girl. Rodrigo is especially skilled at the keeping her songs truthful and fiery while lacing them with humor. On “Bad Idea Right?,” the timing and delivery of the lyric “Fuck it, it’s fine” is its own small comic masterpiece.

Rodrigo is plenty convincing when she turns to ballads — such as the tender “Lacy” or the welling storm of “Making the Bed” — but it’s her retributive anger that really elevates the song and sets her apart from the Swiftian pack. “Logical” sounds pretty; it sticks because of the way Rodrigo seethes lyrics such as “Argument you held over my head/ Brought up the girls you could have instead.” The album closes with “Teenage Dream,” a piano ballad that crescendos majestically as Rodrigo assesses her future in a way familiar to anyone who remembers teetering into adulthood: “They say it all gets better/ It gets better the more you grow/ Yeah, they all say that it gets better/ It gets better, but what if I don’t?” The rawness resonates.

Just as Sour lived up to its name, so does Guts. They are spilled, and the artist doing the spilling still has bravery to spare. It’s becoming more and more clear that Rodrigo is the real deal.