God, It’s brutal out here

**The SOUR opener, brutal, snarls, spirals, detonates, and rewrites the rules of the teen angst anthem.**

Alright music fiends, gather ‘round. Today we’re cracking open Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR like a piñata stuffed with social anxiety, perfectionism trauma, and guitar fuzz rough enough to exfoliate your soul. And leading this emotional cavalry charge is “brutal” — a track that doesn’t just burst through the door, it kicks it off the hinges, screams into the hallway, and dares you to say something about it.

If SOUR is a diary, “brutal” is the page where you carved I’M NOT OKAY AND I’M TIRED OF PRETENDING into the paper with the pen tip.

From Ballet to Breakdown

“brutal” opens with the sweetest, most delicate violin line — like Olivia’s about to pirouette onto a candlelit stage.

Then BAM.
The violins are tackled out a third-story window as crunchy pop-punk guitars crash in like a marching band possessed.

The message is immediate and unmistakable:

This album isn’t soft. It’s scorched earth.

Lyrical Chaos: The Gen Z State of the Union

Olivia doesn’t even clear her throat before dropping the most efficient emotional collapse ever recorded:

“I’m so insecure, I think that I’ll die before I drink.”

Ma’am?? That’s THREE YEARS of therapy crammed into twelve syllables.

And she doesn’t slow down. The whole song is a high-speed audit of every insecurity you’ve ever had while doom-scrolling Instagram at 2 a.m.:

“I’m not cool and I’m not smart and I can’t even parallel park”
“I only have two real friends”
“Who am I if not exploited?”

They’re funny. Until suddenly… they’re not.
They’re relatable. Until suddenly… you’re sitting upright questioning all your life choices.

Behind the Scenes: How “brutal” Was Born

Here’s where the story gets delicious:
“brutal” almost didn’t exist.

In her docufilm Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u, Olivia admits that she and producer Dan Nigro were in the studio deep into making SOUR when she spiraled into a full-on panic about the album’s energy. She thought it needed something more raw, more upbeat, more unhinged.

As she puts it in the film, she was “kind of losing her mind” trying to figure out what the album still needed.

Nigro just grabbed his guitar, casually strummed a few chords, and Olivia said — basically — “Yep. That. Let’s write THAT.”

They wrote “brutal” that same day.

They recorded it the next day.

It was chaos. It was rushed. It was instinctual.

And it became the opening track.

One of the lines Olivia highlights in the docu-film is:

“Who am I, if not exploited?”

She explains that this lyric came straight from how she felt in the moment — overwhelmed, trapped, flung into fame before she had time to brace herself. She says she “remembered feeling trapped, and flung into this situation I wasn’t prepared for.”

The docu-film also frames SOUR as a journey of physical and emotional landscapes — starting writing sessions in Salt Lake City where she was filming HSMTMTS, then driving to L.A. and finishing the record amid heartbreak, pressure, and the whiplash of a skyrocketing career.

“brutal” grew out of that pressure cooker. A panic-written anthem that ended up defining the entire album.

The Sound: Pop-Punk With a Side of Panic

“brutal” is the musical lovechild of early 2000s pop-punk chaos and Gen Z emotional transparency. It’s giving:

Avril Lavigne with a migraine
Hole but make it high school
A Paramore breakdown in a Forever 21 dressing room
Anxiety but with eyeliner

Dan Nigro went full gremlin-mode on the guitars — fuzzy, nasty, perfectly imperfect — grounding Olivia’s vocal spirals in a sonic meltdown that’s somehow cathartic and catchy at the same time.

It’s polished disorder.
An aesthetically pleasing tantrum.

The Fame Pressure Cooker

It’s easy to forget Olivia wrote this at 17. Seventeen.
At an age when most people are figuring out how to not fail their driving test, Olivia was navigating a worldwide spotlight.

“brutal” isn’t just teenage angst. It’s the sound of a girl coming of age while millions of people watch, judge, and dissect her every move.

The docufilm makes this painfully clear. She doesn’t shy away from admitting how overwhelming it all felt — how fame, heartbreak, and expectation crashed into her all at once.

That’s why the line hits so hard:

“And I’m not even sure if I’m gonna survive this.”

It’s less metaphor and more… diary entry.

Why “brutal” Hits So Hard

Because it’s honest.
Not filtered, not branded, not strategically curated.

Just messy, loud, pissed-off honesty.

It’s the soundtrack of staring at your own reflection like:

“Is this the tutorial level? Did I miss the instructions?”

As an album opener, it’s perfect. Messy perfection.
It sets the tone for SOUR with a battle cry disguised as a breakdown.

Paige’s Final Take

“brutal” is the kind of song that grabs you by the collar and says:

“Hey. Stop pretending everything’s fine. It’s okay to lose it a little.”

It’s a battle cry for the overwhelmed.
A hug for the stressed-out.
A mirror for the exhausted.

Olivia Rodrigo didn’t just kick off her debut album with a bang.
She started with a raw nerve — exposed, buzzing, and vibrating with truth.