“If I could say one thing to my 18 year old self, it’s that growing up is awesome. You have so much to look forward to.”

Olivia Rodrigo pauses her show five tracks in, ahead of the desolate self-examination of ‘Teenage Dream’, to pass on some positivity. The downbeat ballad is a song she wrote just short of her 19th birthday, feeling like the best of life had already passed her by. She was, by her own admission, very, very wrong.

Of course, that’s in part because her career is absolutely flying. Sophomore album ‘Guts’ is a sensation, pulling off that rare balance of being beloved by both her massive teenage fanbase and music critics respectively. With a dedicated following of ‘Livies’ – her equivalent of ‘Swifties’ – her shows have an air of let-loose celebration, with Olivia positioned as the boisterous heir apparent to Swift’s pop throne.

We get a sense of that dedicated fanbase early on. Before Rodrigo bounces on stage, a bag of little pieces of coloured paper, each carefully marked with a fanclub email address, are passed row-to-row throughout the seated area. They come together with instructions that when another slow moment – oddball ballad ‘Lacy’ – comes around, we are to cover the lights on our phones to create the colours of an Irish flag across the back of the arena. When the moment arrives, it’s a charming show of dedication, though you can’t help suspect that Rodrigo saw the same thing during night one, despite asking, “How did you do that?”

Make no mistake, though, for all the personal moments – including a teary aside where Rodrigo accepts a stunning portrait of herself from a 14-year-old called Sean Davis at the front of the crowd – this is an exceptionally polished show that flies by with the vibe of a colourful live music video.

Its cleverness is in the variety, the energy, and the contrast offered by the stark, relatively slow-paced debut album ‘Sour’ and the record’s tendency to view its vocalist through a somewhat bleak lens, and the emphatic uprising of sensationally rambunctious, newly self-confident follow up ‘Guts’.

‘Guts’ biggest hit ‘Vampire’, for example, is boldly dropped just three tracks in, after the starlet had leapt on stage to an emphatic ode to temptation with an ex ‘Bad Idea, Right?’, every word met with a deafening sing-along.

Following ‘Vampire’ and its massive vocal crescendos comes a soulful section: the aforementioned ‘Teenage Dream’ is preceded by poetic early hit ‘Drivers License’, and another downbeat exploration of Rodrigo’s love life in ‘Traitor’.

This is a theme of the show: there are swift outfit changes and considered pace variations galore, not so much from song to song, but with entire sweeping sections held together by a ‘feel’, swaying from tear jerking to angry, emphatic self-examination to glorious lyrical statements about the world and the singer’s place in it.

In a section where Rodrigo climbs aboard a large prop moon and is slowly rotated around the arena in front of the upper tiers, for example, we get ‘Logical’, a kind of reverse love song, and ‘Enough For you’, another soulful outpouring of self doubt.

Self doubt, and her increasingly successful fight against it, in fact, seem to be Rodrigo’s stock in trade. She explores it superbly well, not least by landing, ultimately, on the message that the entire idea of self-doubt is futile anyway, and slowly pushing her lyrics into a realm of assurance and belief in herself.

Dublin is treated to the first ever live performance of ‘So American’, a shout-y guitar number about how nationality sits abroad. Then comes a beautiful mellow section that sees Rodrigo and guitarist Daisy Spencer sat in a corner of the stage dressed like it’s a living room, delivering love-lorn break up track ‘Happier’ and ‘Favourite Crime’.

There are moments for the less pop-oriented, too, with ‘Deja Vu’s intro eerily reminiscent of the opening bars of Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises’, while the mellow corners create intimacy, with the LA native holding a massive crowd in thrall of her notably flawless vocals.

The ending, predictably, is all boisterous noisy euphoria, and it suits the singer’s more recent image and represents the pinnacle of her sound. For this reviewer, ‘All-American Bitch’ – which sounds like the imaginative, deeply sarcastic daughter of the entire ‘10 Things I Hate About You’ soundtrack rolled into one – is perhaps Rodrigo’s finest moment.

‘Brutal’ finds Rodrigo at her most aggressive, seeing the singer morph almost on the spot from her “growing up Disney” image into a seething sexuality. The broader stage presence is occasionally brooding and occasionally camera-driven, but most often it simply feels like choreographed ecstasy.

A 1 hour 40 minute set is all over by ten past ten, with Rodrigo having donned a hand-scrawled ‘Guinness is good 4 U’ t-shirt in twin reference to her track of the same name and the old ads. She encourages the crowd to scream at the top of their voices during ‘All-American Bitch’ and closes the whole thing with two more tracks that perhaps better represent the persona ‘Guts’ has seen her morph into.

‘Good 4 U’ and the infectious, lyrically schizophrenic ‘Get Him Back!’ close out a night that is nothing short of euphoric from start to finish, a statement show by an act already in fierce demand, and seemingly destined to plough a furrow deep into the heartlands of modern day pop.

Olivia Rodrigo has layers. Her message explores emotional complexities but is ultimately overwhelmingly positive, and she has a musicality that puts much of the modern charts to shame. What she delivers is a performance so tightly produced it could almost be a theatre production, from the carefully curated ‘under glass’ footage of her and her dancers to the regular skips to the front of her two-pronged stage. She’s a woman with a message, a story, and above all, heaps of heart.

It’s a show you can only leave with a massive grin on your face. On tonight’s evidence, Olivia Rodrigo’s already shining star might be destined for the same kind of lifelong ‘experiential’ thematic arc as Adele has explored on her age-branded records, if delivered in a very different tone. What’s unquestionably clear is Rodrigo is destined only for a greater rise.