The influencer pop sphere is, mathematically, a graveyard with more misfires than successful conversions of internet cachet into hit parades. The same machine that helped Troye Sivan and Benson Boone evolve also yields terrible singles by controversial beauty-industry personality James Charles. When TikTok star Addison Rae first dipped her toe into pop in 2021, she seemed destined for the latter bucket. Her first single, “Obsessed,” didn’t register as the satire she’d intended, as people assumed the dancer, now suddenly a singer, was deeply conceited. But in pop, with the right ideas and co-signs, the bubbliness and determination people came to resent in Rae’s TikTok demeanor are common currency. On her 2023 EP, AR, she worked with up to five co-writers per song and producers who bathed her wispy, inviting voice in familiar dance-pop tropes. Its bops quietly succeeded where Rae’s dalliances in makeup and movies floundered. She has spent the interim workshopping a sound worthy of words of encouragement from Charli XCX and Ariana Grande.
Her debut album, Addison, doesn’t seek simple portfolio diversification. It stages a symbolic break with the past. This is her thing now. She’s dropping the Rae, her middle name. Her parents, frequent fixtures in her early content but more recently in tales of gallivanting with 20-somethings, are notably silent. Addison documents a 24-year-old budding artist coolly working out what even to sing and write about. Unlike her EP, the album is the work of merely three composers: Addison and the Max Martin affiliates Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd. It’s refreshing and light thanks not just to the sunny, southern ersatz-cheerleader disposition that made Addison famous but also to three young women’s trust and relative freedom from industry veterans’ nagging, predictable oversight.
Addison is a high-stakes show of being low-key. Its lyrics revel in agency and possibilities, landing like metatextual reflections on Addison’s overarching professional pivot. “Aquamarine,” a Europop thumper, sounds like sultry Madonna fan service. But beyond the Ray of Light reference, there’s a sense that the hook — “Honey, dive into me / I’m not hiding anymore” — addresses a question that has nagged Addison’s career so far: What emotional depth is there to be found in the work? The maudlin “Times Like These” opens by mulling over outfits that would titillate a partner, but it turns into a venting session about being perceived by millions; her song’s on the radio, she sings, but she worries about the velocity of her life ramping up while others celebrate. The writing is all very slight, but the gains over earlier outings are felt in songs like “Money Is Everything,” a trap-pop spend-it-if-you-got-it jam. “Money” gets close to the concept of “Obsessed.” Here, melodrama and misandry merge in lyrics and a performance drenched in the giddiest disbelief about smoking weed with Lady Gaga. Addison pushes to take itself less seriously, a wise adjustment for the singer famously roasted in 2020 for refusing to stop recording herself to greet her fans. The best songs paint vibrantly on a relatively blank musical slate; the others chase prefabricated styles.
The parallels to Britney Spears are loud. Both Louisiana singers luxuriate at the point where a whisper becomes a coo, and both have crafted gossamer pop with Swedish producers. The blonde-bombshell bedlam in Addison’s “Fame Is a Gun” video resembles the behind-the-scenes drama and starry blue wallpaper of “Lucky,” while “In the Rain” conjures the drum-heavy hip-pop of Britney’s Neptunes collaborations. (A notable difference is that the teenage Spears was not in control of these concepts the way Addison expresses a take-charge approach to her art and image.) Elsewhere, “Summer Forever” and “Diet Pepsi” bask in the heavy reverb and anesthetized upper-register sigh of Lana Del Rey’s “Blue Jeans” and “Summertime Sadness.” These songs fall back on Rae-era propensities, flexing the internet personality’s instinct for a cresting trend but failing to do better than the real Lana songs and knockoffs flooding the market. They abandon the mission of creating some distance between this pop iteration and the Addison who blew up doing lip syncs. More enticing are the songs angling to eke out an insistent literary voice and an impactful but playful sonic imprint.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Even when a lyric can use more time in the oven — take “Times Like These,” which waves off Addison’s anxiety with the humdrum refrain “In times like these, it’s, it’s how it has to be,” or the vague “Life’s no fun through clear waters” line in “Headphones On” — it feels bespoke. Wrapped up in the appeal of TikTok is the idea that everyone is one consequential view away from fame. Addison found her creative bearings in the incentivized piggybacking of this maelstrom. Escaping means finding out and sharing with the world what she’s really like and not just highlighting things she enjoys that she hopes you will, too, as influencers do so well. She’s not trying to write herself into autoplaying after the Spotify chart-toppers in “Times Like These” or “Headphones On.” She’s looking for language that speaks colorfully to her unique status as a newly recertified “It” girl. “Fame” and “High Fashion” have a blast with being an internet punching bag, the former sneering about how little Addison has to do to generate negative press and the latter joking that she cares more about shoes than you. “When you shade me,” “Fame” admits, “it makes me want it more.”
It’s as if she got dragged just enough to know not to come on too intensely, except where there’s humor to be wrung from embodying the vapid LA-to-L.A. glory seeker we had her pegged as. Addison has always wanted in on her own joke, and the album delivers a few of the funniest attacks on her old shtick in the name of building a new persona from those foundations. She cusses and smokes, and she gets that, not so long ago, people didn’t think so much of her. Addison finds that emancipatory. There’s no library of expectations yet. Each single hit like a pleasant shock, and the album succeeds in advancing the agenda of upending any lingering feeling that Addison’s mostly good for an eight-count and a smile. If she wants to push herself as a writer — getting deeper than just wishing her parents hadn’t gotten divorced and maybe interrogating the finer quirks of parasocial relationships between audiences and personalities — the road to a sustained pop tenure is open. If she doesn’t care to do any of that, then Addison is something cool for the summer.
Sign up for The Critics
A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.
