Exciting news for anyone who’s ever flat-ironed their side bangs or spent $40 on a pair of gold lamé leggings: Addison Rae dropped a video for her new song, “Headphones On.” 2008 has never been more back.
The new video features Rae dancing around the Icelandic wilderness in a purple American Apparel–core hoodie, what appears to be Free City sweatpants, neon-pink hair, and wired earbuds as she sings a song of escapism: “Guess I gotta accept the pain / Need a cigarette to make me feel better / Every good thing comes my way / So I still get dolled up.”
The video features a lot of imagery I would have definitely reblogged during Obama’s first term: Rae pensively twirling a clear umbrella, lying on the ground with an iPhone tucked in her neon-green underwear, and pouting in dirty black Converse. There’s lots of moody horseback riding (both on a real horse and on a coin-operated one outside a grocery store). An irrefutable scholar of the Tumblr-girl aesthetic, she even forms her earbuds into a heart at one point.
What is the song about, exactly? Well, Rae sings about her insecurities as an on-the-rise pop star: “I compare my life to the new ‘It’ girl / Jealousy’s a riptide, it pulls me under,” she sings.
She also muses on her parents’ famously rocky relationship: “Wish my mom and dad could have been in lovе / Guess some things werеn’t meant to last forever,” she sings. For those unfamiliar, Rae’s parents — Monty Lopez and Sheri Nicole Easterling — married and divorced, then remarried each other in 2017, and then redivorced each other in 2022. Oh, and then Easterling maybe had a brief dalliance with rapper Yung Gravy.
Anyway, if it weren’t already clear we’re headed for a recession, Rae’s insistence on releasing Tumblr-ready music videos is as sure a sign as any.
