While all my friends in high school were creaming their jeans over the pretty boy vampires in Twilight and Vampire Diaries, I was drawn to Nina Dobrev’s Elena Gilbert and Katherine Pierce and even Victoria because they were beautiful, cunning, and predatory as hell. The boys were the prize everyone else wanted and I understood the appeal but the real predators were right there and that’s where my attention stayed. Katherine Pierce in particular rewired something in my fucking brain permanently, a woman who fed on men, manipulated entire centuries worth of them, and treated every man she destroyed as a completely reasonable night in the sorority house. That specific energy, the seductress who arrives primed, takes what she wants and runs before sunrise, has lived rent free in my head ever since. So when Rosina Buck dropped ‘Vampire,’ I felt it somewhere very specific and very deep, because she didn’t write a song about being afraid of the dark. She wrote a song about being the thing that lives in it.
‘Vampire’ is a seduction song wrapped in gothic vampire symbolism and written from inside the predator’s mind, and holy shit does Rosina own every second of it. She feeds on men and that’s the whole fucking thesis. Her backstory may be dark but that’s just the origin story of a woman who came out the other side as something he absolutely cannot survive. She knows she’s wicked and she’s not losing sleep over the wreckage she leaves behind. Real talk – this song made me feel feral in the best way possible. I have been this woman on at least four separate occasions and felt goddamn empowered doing it. What makes this thing so decadent, though, is that Rosina arrived sharpened into something he can’t resist, and she is savoring every single second of how weak she makes him.
Rosina opens with a confession that doubles as a warning. “It’s what we do with men / Gets us into trouble / We can’t help it / It’s what we do with them / Between the shadows / Gets the neighbors calling / Quiet down the noise.” She’s not sorry and she is sure as hell not stopping. The neighbors are calling because she is riding him so hard the headboard is taking out the drywall and she does not give a single shit. Then she delivers the line that sets the whole seduction in motion: “I’m not gonna tell you where I’ve been / Just kiss my neck.” She’s been out in the dark feeding and when he opens his mouth to ask about it she puts it somewhere more useful.
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Where it gets truly sinister is the morning-after. “And in the morning / I’m gonna run / Before the dust / Quietly we lie / Waiting for the twilight / These two hearts could never feel the cold.” She runs before sunrise because that’s what vampires do and the cold can’t touch her because she’s already something beyond human feeling. That line about two hearts that could never feel the cold is doing double duty, two people so deep in each other’s heat that the cold can’t get in, and she is the only reason that warmth exists because the second she runs at sunrise he is going to be lying in a cold bed wondering what the hell just happened to him.
Then the origin story arrives mid-song and I was not prepared for it. “Deep between the eyes / Is years and years of violence / Where was mummy / Where was daddy when he called.” The damage is right there in the middle of the seduction and she moves past it in the same breath, because the wound is not the point, the predator that came out of it is. She moves on immediately. “I keep tripping up on my name / Keep tripping up on my…” She can’t even finish the sentence. The identity has dissolved so completely into the predator that the person underneath is genuinely hard to locate, and honestly that’s the scariest shit in the whole track.
The chorus is pure seduction dressed up as sweetness and it is goddamn lethal. ” Oh me oh my / Come on close the door behind you / Love me for forever / Let’s have fun tonight / And you can lay right here beside me / Till the early hours / It’ll be alright / As long as the moon shines. “ That last line is so sinister because the moon shining means the sun isn’t up yet and the sun coming up is when she disappears. She’s promising him forever and the fine print is that forever ends at dawn.
She’s been patient as hell and here’s the payoff. “Sick and tired of boring talking / Wake me up in the morning / So I can take, take my final bite.” The final bite. She’s been playing the long game this whole song and the way Rosina delivers that “take, take” is so deliberate and so unhurried, like she’s already certain she’s getting what she came for.
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The bridge is where it gets genuinely beautiful in the most fucked up way. “Sorry if my love confuses / I was born with bumps and bruises / Trapped inside this weary wicked mind / I’d like to meet you in the churchyard / When the church bells chime / Kiss me on my neck.” The apology at the top is so casual it barely registers as one. She acknowledges the bruises and the wicked mind and then immediately redirects to the churchyard rendezvous. She’s so consumed by the hunt that she’s inviting him to the one place that could actually weaken her and that is the most vulnerable she gets in the entire song.
The production on this thing is genuinely unhinged in the best possible way. It started life as a slow ethereal folk piece and then Mike Trim, who comes from a film composition and sound design background, got his hands on it and dragged it into this bold funk-infused beast with cinematic textures and actual subtle screams woven into the mix. The sonic nods to vampire mythology are playful and deliberate and every layer feels like it was placed there specifically to mess with your nervous system. Then there are the harmonies, arranged and performed by Bronte Shande, Rosina’s longtime friend and former duo partner from their project Circe’s Diner, and holy shit the chemistry between their voices is so intimate it almost feels like you’re intruding on something private. “We’ve both got a mischievous side and when we come together it feels like magic,” she explained and you can hear exactly that, two women who lived whole separate lives since they last made music together, finding each other again and sounding like they never fucking left.
I spent years thinking my fixation on Katherine Pierce was just a teenage thing I’d grow out of once I stopped watching CW dramas at midnight. Turns out I wasn’t obsessed with a fictional vampire, I was recognizing my inner seductress who loses herself in others and finds it thrilling rather than terrifying. Who walks back into the dark because that’s where she’s always been most alive. Rosina Buck made that feeling into a song and Bronte Shande helped her bring it back to life, two women returning to something that once pulsed between them and letting it run again, and if Rosina is Katherine Pierce in this scenario then Bronte is Elena Gilbert, equally drawn to the darkness, equally dangerous when the lights go out. That’s the whole goddamn gift of ‘Vampire.’ Some things don’t belong in the light.
