Dracula

Kevin Parker’s original “Dracula,” off Deadbeat, is a decent illustration of his long-running trick of hiding a downer lyric inside music built to move a dance floor — the narrator likens himself to the count, a recluse who can only function once the sun’s down, and the metaphor for withdrawal and depression sits underneath a groove that never once sounds like it’s carrying that weight. It’s the credited first co-write he’s brought in since “Elephant” (Sarah Aarons gets a shared credit), and it’s fine — critics split roughly down the middle on it at release, calling it everything from “the immediate standout” to “vapid,” and both readings are defensible. As a standalone Tame Impala single it peaked in the mid-20s on the Hot 100 and mostly stayed a Deadbeat deep cut, not a moment.

Then JENNIE got added to it. The remix — her verse plus vocals threaded through the whole track, not just a guest sixteen — is the version actually charting at No. 8 this week, off roughly half a million TikTok videos built around the sound, and it’s worth being blunt about what that number is measuring: not a reassessment of the song’s songwriting, but a platform trend attaching itself to a groove that was already built to be looped. It gave both acts their first Hot 100 top 10 — a real, non-trivial milestone for JENNIE as a soloist and for Parker as a solo artist rather than a featured writer — but the song itself is the same one critics were shrugging at eleven months ago. The remix adds energy and a second voice worth hearing; it doesn’t retroactively resolve the original split verdict. 6.4/10 — a good groove riding a viral loop further than the song on its own ever got.

Hero image: JENNIE, 2023, licensed under CC BY 3.0.