We have officially survived the Olivia Rodrigo drought.
Two years (one month and nine days — but who’s counting?) after her debut album, “Sour,” the 20-year-old singer released her new single, “Vampire,” at midnight ET. An angsty pop power ballad lamenting over being used for fame, the already-hit song is ushering in what many fans are calling a ‘new era’ for the three-time Grammy winner and her coming sophomore album.
The track begins with nothing but dark, brooding piano — raw and resonant — as Rodrigo ruminates on a manipulative past relationship. “Six months of torture you sold as some forbidden paradise,” she sings, regretting her self-professed naiveté. Painfully recalling wound after wound, the mix fills as Rodrigo barrels towards a powerful pre-chorus, establishing the parallels between her ex-partner and a life-leaching vampire. At the chorus’s climax, nearly all the instrumentation fades, leaving Rodrigo to deliver the song’s lethal, rage-filled blow: “Bloodsucker, fame fucker / Bleedin’ me dry like a god damn vampire.”
The rest of the song only continues to build, thundering towards the early-2000s pop-punk sound that Rodrigo has so iconically made her own. “My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out,” Rodrigo explained in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time, and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.”
The song precedes Rodrigo’s highly-anticipated second album, “GUTS,” which will be released on Sept. 8. Though pressures are high — as “Sour” went quadruple platinum and quickly became the Billboard 200’s longest-charting debut album of the 21st century — Rodrigo told Lowe that “GUTS” feels like “a natural step forward, a natural progression” in her career.
“For me, the album is about growing pains and trying to figure out who I am…
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