Olivia Rodrigo promised her sophomore album Guts would be happier than Sour, then introduced the era with a bloody, vengeful, gothic track called Vampire. This deep dive explores how a raw, solitary moment at a grand piano transformed into a sweeping tempo-shifting rock opera that captivated the world and subverted every expectation.

We trace the song from an out-of-body writing experience in December 2022 to the studio, where Rodrigo and Dan Nigro built a thunderstorm of accelerating tempos around it. The track topped charts globally, tied a Billboard record for chart endurance, and earned three Grammy nominations.

• How the escalating tempo mirrors the feeling of a rising panic
• The Radiohead Creep comparison and the music theory of dread
• The exploitation and age-gap narrative embedded in the lyrics
• The got ...