By Robert Moran
Addison Rae’s Addison: decadent, hazy, cosmopolitan cool.
Addison Rae, Addison
How did a TikTok personality end up with the year’s most anticipated pop album? The simple answer is because she’s Addison Rae and that’s what she does.
For years, Rae amassed TikTok followers (88 million of them) with her cute dance routines, delivered with a beaming smile and an All-American tan. Even if you weren’t on TikTok, you might’ve recognised her from teaching Kourtney how to dance on Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Maybe you even heard The Kid Laroi’s early tribute song in her honour.
The TikTok-to-talent pipeline has been fraught for many a social media star, but Rae cracked its code when she segued to music. In 2023, her EP AR bubbled to cult status after Charli XCX cosigned on the slinky 2 Die 4, and then Rae’s piercing wail on Charli XCX’s Von Dutch Remix became a defining sound of Brat Summer. Further cameos onstage alongside Charli XCX and Troye Sivan gave Rae clout and music’s snobbier set permission to pay attention.
Rae then went on a tear with a remarkable string of singles, all of which feature on her debut album Addison, including Diet Pepsi, where she eased into the gloomy romanticism of Lana Del Rey; Aquamarine, which evoked the deep house grooves of Ray of Light-era Madonna and Impossible Princess-era Kylie; and High Fashion, a perfectly demented pop song built on wompy synths, a drugged-out click, and Rae’s lusty falsetto.
Better yet have been their matching music videos, where Rae – in her element – projects decadent glamour. She rolls around in couture; she chain-smokes cigarettes like a French person; she uses her body louchely when she dances, mostly in Louboutins, a wink to pop excess. (Proving the extent to which the taste-making establishment have sought her association, Rae’s creative team now regularly includes indie director Sean Price Williams, choreographer Danielle Polanco, and Interview Magazine’s Mel Ottenberg on creative design.)
By this point, the album’s already an afterthought. That it aims to be a statement, in the old school kinda way, is appreciated. Entirely overseen by Swedish producers Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd, the songs on Addison emit a hazy, twilight, cosmopolitan cool. They smell like petrichor and oud.
The album cuts not already released add to Rae’s narrative. Opener New York is upbeat hyperpop charting Rae’s arrival to big-city liberation, built around the evocative couplet “chew gum, kick drum”, a sort of Pink Pony Club for trashbags. The fabulously bratty Money is Everything finds Rae aligning herself with Marilyn Monroe over a bellowing trap beat and sing-songy kids’ chant, her mischievous energy turned infectious.
To obsessives, there’s been a playful sense of destiny in Rae’s arrival to pop stardom: she was born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana, barely two hours (and two decades) from Kentwood, the hometown of Britney Spears. Some foresee the second coming, but the goodwill’s not been unanimous.
Look under any of her videos and you’ll find a comment like “This rebrand should be studied in schools” – the implication being that, while successful, Rae’s evolution from online personality to pop artist has felt manufactured or inauthentic. (The idea that, god forbid, someone might develop better taste and influences later into their 20s and 30s, is inconceivable to this generation.)
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In interviews, Rae’s palmed off her former girl-next-door persona on TikTok as marketing savvy. “Taste is a privilege,” she told the New York Times, suggesting she’d been actively maximising her algorithmic fame to better position herself to eventually manoeuvre beyond the app. But it lends a defensiveness to Addison that, if necessary on her debut, feels antithetical to Rae’s personal world-building.
On Money is Everything, she screams her holy trinity as evidence of her pop bona fides: “DJ, play Madonna, wanna roll one with Lana, get high with Gaga, and the girl I used to be is still the girl inside of me!” . On In the Rain, over a sweet acid house beat that could’ve come from Saint Etienne’s Foxbase Alpha, she laments that she’s “misunderstood but I’m not gonna sweat it, isn’t it all for the show?” On Diet Pepsi, Addison’s first single, she was seductively suggesting she’s “losing all my innocence” at, c’mon, 24?
For some reason, it all reminds me of Camila Cabello, whose last album, C, XOXO, was its own attempt at a grungy reinvention. Pop fans rejected Cabello’s pivot, but there’s something in Addison’s nostalgic touchstones – the Alanis yodels, the Janet adlibs, the ’90s aesthetics – that might be more palatable to most than Cabello’s adventurous tilt towards hyperpop and SoundCloud rap. Maybe what I’m saying is Camila Cabello walked so Addison Rae could run.
And run she has, all the way from TikTok to pop’s ruling class. And in Louboutins at that.
Addison by Addison Rae is out now.