Olivia Rodrigo’s Big, Bloody Return
“Vampire,” the singer’s first new song in two years, pushes her confessional-pop appeal to a sizzling extreme.
Hype comes in many varieties, most of them despicable, but the buzz that preceded Olivia Rodrigo’s new single was the relatively healthy sort. In 2021, the then-teenage Disney actor conquered the Billboard Hot 100 with not just a fresh face and a smart marketing campaign, but a sense of musical possibility, hinting that commercial pop still had new directions to evolve in. Chatty lyrics and breathy singing defined her debut album, Sour, but her hit singles—especially “Driver’s License,” “Good 4 U,” “Deja Vu,” and “Brutal”—were eclectic. The listening public, as it turned out, could handle a star who careened from piano balladry to emo to experimental pop and even hard rock. So over the past two years, as she worked on her second album, curiosity mounted: Where would she go next?
Of course, many promising new voices before her have made compromises in order to stay in the spotlight once they’ve attained it. Her new song could have been a rehash of one of her hits, or it could have appropriated some trending sound (how long before we get Disney drill?). But happily, she opted to try to live up to the title of her forthcoming album, Guts. Her first single in two years, “Vampire,” pushes her confessional-pop appeal to a sizzling extreme, and you’d have to be undead to not feel a little excitement.
The track is piano rock, tapping into a tradition of theatrical angst that leashes wild feelings to the tight, tidy jabbing of keys. This is likely to be divisive: Rodrigo and her producer, Dan Nigro, channel her previously stated inspirations (Fiona Apple, Billy Joel), but also some surprising, and daringly corny, artists (Muse, Mika). As on much of Sour, Rodrigo’s melody is made up of short phrases that stack like Legos. She also still sings in that bizarre accent that singer-songwriters have employed for years now—parties are “pourties”; torture is “tuh-hor-ture”—to build drama.
But the spark of the song comes from the way its simple elements layer into crushing heaviness. The more-than-a-minute-long intro is slow in an illusory way; Rodrigo’s vocal itself keeps a brisk tempo, which the song’s accumulating percussion later underlines. The way that the arrangement falls to silence around the big declaration of the chorus—“bloodsucker / fame fucker”—is an old trick, but the jackhammering guitar that comes right after is a shock, a chaser more potent than the shot. The best moment is in the bridge, when Rodrigo’s rambling cadence slides into a Freddy Mercury–like wail, which stretches and modulates for a beat or two longer than seems natural. The sensation is that of the gravity under you changing again, again, and again.
Rodrigo is venting about the trusty topic of heartbreak, with rather specific details about an older man who used her for her clout over the course of a six-month relationship. As with her breakout hit, “Driver’s License,” a social-media feeding frenzy is likely to result from listeners speculating about the real-life inspiration for this tale. But what punches through is hurt and fury conveyed by lines such as “I used to think I was smart / But you made me look so naive.” We’ve all felt that way before—how will Rodrigo make it sound next?
