Five Burning Questions About Tame Impala & JENNIE’s ‘Dracula’ Being a Chart-Topping Pop Airplay Hit

A sentence that many would have had great difficulty computing a decade ago, but is now undeniably true: Tame Impala — with assistance from one of the ladies from BLACKPINK — has one of the biggest pop hits in the country.

In fact, the one-time psych-rocker born Kevin Parker has the single most played song this week on the top 40 airwaves, as his “Dracula” tops the Pop Airplay chart dated July 11. The song, given an extra boost by JENNIE‘s appearance on the official remix, also climbs to a new peak of No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, easily the highest placement reached by either artist.

How surreal is it to be bracing Tame Impala, pop star? And who could be the next critically acclaimed indie fav to make the leap to crossover hitmaker status? Billboard staffers discuss these questions and more below.

1. “Dracula” reaches No. 8 on the Hot 100 this week while topping the Pop Airplay chart for the first time. On a scale from 1-10, how surreal is it to see Tame Impala — artist behind several of the most psychedelic guitar-rock epics of the early 2010s — now as a late-2020s pop chart-topper?

Katie Bain: 3. Given how big Tame Impala has been for a long time (they headlined Coachella back in 2019, after all), they’re an act that just seemed like they’d already achieved this type of accomplishment. This chart position is a touch surreal in the long term, given that they were being called the new Led Zeppelin when Innerspeaker came out in 2010, but I think a lot of people would have assumed something like this had happened given how globally popular they are. And I guess for people who’ve been paying closer attention, given the evolution of the Tame Impala sound, something like this doesn’t feel all that surprising. 

Eric Renner Brown: A 6. As a Tame Impala fan who has been on board since the heady days of its 2010 debut, Innerspeaker, it’s certainly surreal — albeit not as weird as some longtime Tame Impala fans might suggest. It’s been a decade since Rihanna included her technically-a-cover-but-really-just-karaoke version of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” on ANTI, not just paving the way for Parker’s crossover into the mainstream, but also for his aesthetic to become a defining flavor of contemporary pop music. He’s been headlining major festivals for about as long; Tame Impala stopped being a niche indie-rock thing long ago.

Kyle Denis: About an 8! At this point, it takes a lot to surprise me when it comes to the wonky trajectories of major pop players in the past decade — but Tame Impala’s evolution is definitely up there. What a difference a decade (and a Rihanna co-sign) can make!  

Andrew Unterberger: Gotta be at least an 8. Even with the way Tame Impala’s cult stardom had long been ballooning to the point where only the finest of lines were separating it from mainstream stardom, there’s something so specifically dead-center about Parker having the most-played pop radio song in the country that it’s still hard for me to square with the guy behind “Apocalypse Dreams” and “Let It Happen.” Pretty cool though.

Christine Werthman: Call me jaded, but I think it’s only a 3, maybe a 4 for me. Groovy dude Kevin Parker is a perennial favorite among many (see: two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden in 2019 and four sold-out shows at Barclays in 2025), and TikTok trends explode the most random songs all the time (as one did with the “Dracula” remix earlier this year), so it’s not super shocking to see “Dracula” popping off.

2. Obviously Tame Impala’s profile has grown considerably over the last 15 years — does it make sense that “Dracula” was the song to really put Kevin Parker over the top as a pop star? Is it more about the song itself for about him just getting too big as an artist not to have at least one proportionally sized hit?

Katie Bain: I think to a certain extent the popularity of “Dracula” is drafting off the popularity of “Neverender,” Parker’s 2024 collaboration with Justice. They’re in the same sort of sonic wheelhouse, and given how huge that song was (and how it in fact opened up a new audience for Justice and gave them the first number one in their own long, celebrated and relatively underground career), I think the scene was very much set for Parker to score a hit with a song that sounds like its predecessor’s DNA cousin.   

Eric Renner Brown: It mostly makes sense. Parker has been dancing around pop’s A-list for years now — the main stumbling block to him having a pop hit has been his own starpower and name recognition, which still pale in comparison to many of his pop contemporaries. He surmounted that here by linking up with JENNIE. (Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism, which Parker produced, didn’t spawn any major hits; while he wasn’t credited as a featured artist, this conversation would be fascinating to have had a song like “Houdini” or “Training Season” had significant chart success.)

Kyle Denis: I think it’s a combination of the two. Tame Impala’s most recent tour in support of Deadbeat, the LP that houses “Dracula,” commenced with four back-to-back nights at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, leading into an arena-headlining world tour that will play 80 shows across three continents through October 25. Those kinds of touring stats for a trek promoting a 2025 LP signal that a true pop hit was a matter of “when,” not “if.” And that’s not even getting into his 2020 album The Slow Rush, hitting a career high of No. 3 on the Billboard 200, or the 250+ weeks his 2015 Currents LP has spent on the ranking. 

And while I enjoy most of Deadbeat — including lead single “End of Summer” — “Dracula” arguably has the album’s strongest melody and catchiest hook. You add Parker’s playful, falsetto-anchored vocal performance, and the song simply lodges itself in your head. There’s also something to be said about the 2020s being the decade of dance (and country); Tame Impala and the mainstream have been inching towards each other for the past few years — and “Dracula” feels like a natural convergence. 

Andrew Unterberger: I think it’s probably not a huge coincidence that “Dracula” started popping off not long after the greatest vampiric pop star of the past 15 years released his unofficial goodbye album. The Weeknd used to be a steadily reliable source for these kind of bleary-eyed, nocturnal, electro-pop quasi-love songs on top 40 radio, and “Dracula” posits Tame Impala as a solid temporary substitute, if not an outright long-term successor. (Tough to be the latter when Parker is already a solid half-decade older than Abel Tesfaye.)

Christine Werthman: I need to bring back the ranking scale for a moment to say I am registering at a 9 to see anyone call Kevin Parker a pop star. He’s big, no doubt, and I was informed that this song went top 40 even before the remix, but pop star? Slow your roll. Back to the question at hand: His stature certainly matters, but I don’t think his name alone pulls this into the top 40, let alone the top 10. Credit that extra push to the song itself: It’s a breezy, quirky, mildly spooky bop…with a TikTok trend…and a JENNIE remix. Lots going for it beyond just being a Tame Impala song. 

3. How important do you think the JENNIE remix is to the song becoming a top 10 Hot 100 hit? Do you think it improves on or adds anything significant to the original?

Katie Bain: I don’t think the JENNIE remix adds anything all that significant, besides, obviously, the presence of one of the world’s biggest pop stars. That, I’m sure, did some serious heavy lifting in terms of broadening the song’s appeal and elevating it to top 10.

Eric Renner Brown: This song isn’t a Hot 100 top 10 without JENNIE on it. Her starpower is what lifted this beyond his normal alternative wheelhouse — and why a song like “Neverender,” also an Alternative Airplay No. 1, didn’t cross over. As for what JENNIE brings to the song? The remix is good. So was the original. I can’t imagine ever putting on the remix instead of the original, personally, but it’s a fine single, and it’s clear how the remix has broadened the song’s audience and made it more of a radio slam-dunk.

Kyle Denis: Very important. JENNIE is a huge star who brings “Dracula” to an audience that may have never clicked play on a Tame Impala track. Personally, I don’t really care for her remix, but the viral TikTok trend it spawned helped the song bounce into the top 10 of the Hot 100, so I’ll take it! 

Andrew Unterberger: Undeniably important, in the sense that the viral trend associated with the JENNIE vocal (“My friends are saying, ‘Shut up, Jenny….’”) was what first helped the song get a second wind on the Hot 100 a few months back. As for actually improving the song: It gives it a fun new element, for sure, but the original was already plenty fun to me — and I liked it a little better when Kevin’s friends were the ones telling him to shut up and just get in the car.

Christine Werthman: Hearing JENNIE sing, “My friends are saying, ‘Shut up, Jennie/ Just get in the car,’” is more fun than hearing Kevin say it, but her guest appearance doesn’t reinvent the original. But I do appreciate that her vocal part is sprinkled throughout the song, rather than slapped on with a standalone verse at the end. 

4. “Dracula” has proven divisive within the Tame Impala fanbase, with some seeing it as a natural extension of the electro-pop-drifitng work he’s been doing for the last decade, and others seeing it as more of a compromise for the charts. Where do you fall on the discussion?

Katie Bain: I had no philosophical issue with the original “Dracula,” especially given how it fit into Parker’s trajectory given the aforementioned “Neverender” and what he did generally on Deadbeat. The remix feels like a chart play. 

Eric Renner Brown: As a psych-rock-loving Tame Impala Day One, I can say this: My fellow longtime Tame Impala heads, give it up. Parker has now been making spacey electro-pop for longer than he was making lava-lamp-coded guitar rock. I miss that flavor too, sometimes! But this is a path he has been on for a while now, and it only seems like an oddity or a compromise if you continue to insist that working with Lady Gaga (2016) or Travis Scott (2018) or Dua Lipa (2024) are aberrations rather than the direction he chose to take — exactly what many of the fans who started following Tame Impala after Innerspeaker or 2012’s Lonerism continue to do.

Kyle Denis: I… don’t think it’s worth a discussion? What’s important to me is that “Dracula” doesn’t sound like a concession, nor does it sound like an obvious outlier on Deadbeat. It’s both a natural extension of his sonic evolution and the most natural meeting place between his current output and the state of top 40.

Andrew Unterberger: It was bound to happen. I can understand the folks who see it as being a step too goofy — especially those chorus lyrics — but sonically, we’ve been heading in this direction for a while now. And Parker’s good at this stuff! He must be, or “Dracula” wouldn’t have been stuck in my head for the entirety of late 2025 as it was.

Christine Werthman: Look, I’m not a fan of the original or the remix, but I don’t think this is a monumental departure from the usual Tame Impala songs. A little more upbeat, I guess? Let the man dance.

5. Who’s another critically acclaimed veteran artist who you could see scoring a big pop breakthrough hit in the next year or two?

Katie Bain: I’d love to see an artist like Kaytranada or Bonobo, who’ve both been making really sophisticated electronic music for a long time, link with the right vocalist and clock a crossover. (Although I’m not sure that’s what either really want!)

Eric Renner Brown: On the Hot 100, country is bigger than it has been in years. Alt-country critical darlings Wednesday feature on the new Weezer single, and the band’s MJ Lenderman was booked to support Zach Bryan on tour this summer (he dropped out of the dates). It feels supremely weird to suggest that either of those artists might have a pop breakthrough — but it 2014, it felt weird to say that about Tame Impala, too.

Kyle Denis: Maybe the next 2-3 years… but I’m going with Kelela here. Between her forthcoming PinkPantheress duet (“The Bridge”) and the way her upcoming New Avatar album is previewing what I’m expecting to be a larger resurgence of rock sensibilities amongst pop-facing acts, I think we can swing her a legitimate pop breakthrough soon.

Andrew Unterberger: Mk.gee seems to be following a good deal of the Kevin Parker playbook over his first few years in the spotlight — with a bit of an accelerated timeline, even — so I could see him dipping his toes into pop radio sooner than most of us would probably guess.

Christine Werthman: Does Tame Impala count as a veteran artist? I suppose 2007, the year of conception, was 19 years ago, so let’s go with a band close in age: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, formed around 2010. Keep that psych-rock vibe going!