Songfacts®:

• In early August 2022, Scottish singer Katie Gregson-Macleod posted a 45-second TikTok clip of a song inspired by her hero, Phoebe Bridgers. She captioned it: "here's my saviour complex song."
  
  The work-in-progress track quickly gained traction and within days had racked up millions of views and comments from the likes of Maisie Peters, Mae Muller, Lennon Stella, and Joe Jonas.
  
  Record labels flocked to the coffee shop where the Edinburgh University student worked, and she eventually signed with Columbia. "It's as you do when you are a small artist, you put bits of your work up there, and it was kind of mindless in the way," Gregson-Macleod told The Inverness Courier, "but I went to bed and then the next morning it was huge! It was kinda crazy."
• After signing with Columbia, Gregson-MacLeod completed the raw and heartfelt piano ballad. The slow-building song recounts her complex relationship with her emotionally inaccessible boyfriend.
  
  I need him like water
  He lives on a landslide
  I cry in his bathroom
  He turns off the big light
  
  Her man is incapable of giving Gregson-Macleod the love she needs and is sucking the life out of her, but despite her heartbreak, the singer still thinks he's "a good guy."
• Gregson-Macleod wrote the song inspired by Phoebe Bridgers' account of a relationship with a needy, self-hating person, "Savior Complex."
• Rather than bringing in an outside producer, Columbia released Gregson-Macleod's original solemn demo. The arrangement comprises her singing backed by her simple and haunting piano playing.
  
  "This version had to come out," Gregson-Macleod told Nylon. "This super raw, very much untouched, bit of mixing [version], because I've been on TikTok and I've seen it happen a thousand of times with versions of songs. People on TikTok can be very purest. [They] really want it to be exactly how they heard it in the video. Both for them, and for myself, I wanted to do a raw moment before releasing a version with more arrangement and strings."
• "Complex" is a raw and introspective track that delves into the turbulent journey of coming of age. The song was the culmination of months, if not years, of Gregson-MacLeod's life experiences.
  
  As she reflected on her past, Gregson-Macleod recognized patterns that had been lingering for years. The song served as a vessel for her to confront these complex emotions and move forward. "It's so cathartic to be able to put thoughts that are so complicated into words," she shared to NME. "Often, ugly feelings that you don't really want to have."
  
  The process of creating "Complex" was a stream-of-consciousness for the singer. "It was quick to write, and it's hard to even remember putting it together," said Gregson-Macleod. "I just said this list of thoughts exactly as they came to me."