I'll admit when I'm wrong...

Review of Addison Rae's debut album, "Addison"

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but Addison Rae, former cheerleader and one of the predominant Tiktokers’ debut album is actually kinda good. Okay, I can’t say I was necessarily wrong about her, I never really had an opinion about her music to begin with. But I think its saying something that I was so intrigued by her first full-length project that I pushed back everything else I was working on to write about this album immediately. It’s been a few weeks since I first listened to the record, and as I’ve sat with it and thought a lot about the music and Rae as an artist, there’s so much to unpack in what this album is telling us about pop music, and pop stars, as a whole. In her construction of a pop star persona from her previous influencer persona, she’s letting us peek into what goes into building a pop icon.

Uncommon for an artist releasing their debut album, we already know quite a lot about Addison Rae. She’s certainly not a stranger to the public eye. Before she was Addison Rae, TikTok mega-star-turned-newest-pop-girl, she was just Addison Rae Easterling, girl from Louisiana who loved dance and cheerleading and MTV. She dreamed of performing ever since she was a kid, even if she understands that very few people believe these passions are far from new. Rae studied dance, ballet, jazz, and contemporary, since the age of six. It became a tool she could use to “find the poise she craved.” Her first introduction to the pop stars that would become her inspirations came from her mom’s love of MTV. It was “Madonna and Michael Jackson videos; Lady Gaga’s debut album, The Fame; and fellow Louisiana native Britney Spears, who gave Rae hope that she could make it out of the bayou, too.” She was studying broadcast journalism at Louisiana State University when she started posting online, thinking that by covering sports, “that was my in to the entertainment industry.” When she decided broadcasting wasn’t for her, she tried to change her major to dentistry, thinking it would be a field where “she could make a good living and not worry about finding a job.” Around the same time, she had also been rejected from the competitive dance team at LSU, “a lifelong dream for the girl who had been dancing competitively since she was six,” leading her to “really reassess my goals.” After her advisor told her that school would always be there, Rae felt encouraged and decided to go all-in on social media. “I just had this really strong intuition and gut feeling that, as unrealistic as it seemed, I needed to do it—there’s no time like now to try and chase those dreams.”

When she first moved to Los Angeles, she stayed with a family of an internet friend. She remains grateful for them taking her in “because I don’t know how I would have ever made that work otherwise.” She also signed with William Morris Endeavor talent agency and “began pursuing every job opportunity she could get her hands on.” That’s when she started posting several times a day, every day, taking any sponsored content gig she could “to make money to try and make this work for myself…I was like, ‘There’s only one chance.’ It was a big bet to make, and I knew I would hate myself if I didn’t try as hard as I could to make this happen.’” She started making music, putting out songs like “Obsessed” to negative reviews. When it came time for her to sign with a major record label, “few record labels were clamoring to sign an influencer whose initial attempt at a music career flopped so spectacularly.” Through her partner, Omer Fedi, she was given a meeting with Columbia Records, to which she “walked in with a binder and I made a slideshow.” After a presentation of “pictures and word clouds that she felt represented who she would be as a performer,” and no music to play at that time, “it was about trust.” Evidently whatever she presented showed promise as she was signed to Columbia in 2024.

Despite her southern charm and outward facing bubbly optimism, Rae has already had her fair share of both struggles and controversies even in her short career. Her family’s financial struggles, particularly after she lost out on the stipend offered by the LSU dance team, along with her parents’ divorce, are partially what led her to start posting online in the first place, to find a creative outlet for her troubles. But once she was in Los Angeles and in the Hype House, the struggles didn’t end there. Like being part of a reality TV show, part of being in the house was having all eyes on the members’ personal lives, including Rae and her boyfriend Bryce Hall. They dated on and off from 2019 until 2022 and the time they were together was marred by cheating rumors and questions of political leaning. Hall’s public expressions of support for then-former-president-and-presidential candidate Donald Trump added to ongoing questioning of Rae’s politics. In 2020, Rae faced controversy for a 2016 reposting on content that called the Black Lives Matter movement “a cult” and claimed that “all lives matter.” Rae did apologize, saying “Because of my privilege, I didn't understand and wasn't educated enough on the social injustices facing the Black community…All lives cannot matter until Black lives do,” and she publicly stated that she was not a Trump supporter. But just a year later, criticisms surfaced again after a footage was found where Rae was “excitedly approaching Donald Trump at a UFC fight, introducing herself with a wide smile and eager energy.” Many fans found this to be “tone-deaf, especially given the political climate at the time.” In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2021, Rae addressed the controversy again, saying “I mean, I don’t support Trump…And if someone does, that’s their opinion and I respect everyone’s opinion, for each their own. But it’s very rare on occasion that you ever get to meet a former president, and I think most people could agree with me on that. It’s very uncommon. And I consider myself a friendly person, and so introducing myself does not mean I stand behind anything that any respective person condones.”

To this day, there are still replies on nearly every single one of her posts, criticizing her for her racist and MAGA views, views that she maintains are “largely from undeveloped political views she held as a preteen raised in a conservative environment.” Despite her first (and currently only) public political endorsement for Democratic nominee and then-Vice-President Kamala Harris in 2024, she says “people have decided who I am.” But still she “loves watching the surprise on people’s faces when they hear her music or see her daring red-carpet looks.”

When Rae first started posting on the new platform known as TikTok, she thought of it as “just another social media platform to try.” Her first video to go viral was a simple one—“a sun-kissed Rae with long, beachy waves mouths along to a trending sound bite before a hand grabs her hair and pulls her offscreen.” That video garnered more than 50,000 likes. The rhyme and reason of the internet is something better left alone, especially when it comes to the coveted unique algorithm of TikTok, but it ultimately remains true across generations and technological advances that “some people are just exceptionally hot.” And much like early fans fell in love with model Kate Moss when she was just the cheeky girl on the beach, “the algorithm loved this cute girl with the cleft chin and the perpetual smile.”

As her follower count grew, brands ranging from “obscure fast-fashion sites to American Eagle and L’Oreal” were reaching out to have Rae promote their products. Even though she says it was “still at such a small scale,” Rae recognized that this attention was “how I’m going to be able to do what I’ve always wanted to do.” After she reached 1 million followers on TikTok in October 2019, with her family’s blessing, she dropped out of college and moved with her mom to Los Angeles. It was here that she first connected with the future members of Hype House, called the “Gen Z Brat Pack” and all eyes were on the house members and “who was dating or feuding or duetting who.” Rae and her fellow creators became “ambassadors of the new American dream, where anyone can become rich and famous with just their phone, good lighting, and the willingness to post as often as they can.”

But it was never Rae’s vision to be a new media social media star. She always had her sights set on more. In recent years, Rae’s taken a step back from her near-constant posting on TikTok. This “step back from algorithmic ubiquity” allowed Rae “better control over her narrative” and it also “added a crucial layer of mystique to her persona.” Her debut album, called simply Addison is in some way a reintroduction instead of the more traditional first introduction that we get with a first record. Despite reinvention being an “unusual concept to apply to someone at the beginning of their career,” it is that, too, in that we have come to know Rae in one aspect of her career and are now seeing her transform before our eyes into another kind of star. As a clear student of pop music, Rae knows her work is cut out for her and she doesn’t seem to be afraid of doing what’s needed to be seen as she always wished to be, even if that means leaving some questioning as to “is this the product of a manufactured reinvention, or was this who she was all along?” But I have no doubt that she knows what she’s doing. “She’s releasing bits and pieces to intrigue the audience and make them want more…She’s actually now creating a story.”

My favorites from this album are “Diet Pepsi,” “High Fashion,” “In the Rain,” “Times Like These,” and “Headphones On.”

The songs across this album are a hodgepodge of references to the big pop girls of the last 20 plus years—Madonna, Britney, Lana, Selena, Ariana, Charli. She can’t go wrong in paying homage to the greats. And rather than seeming like she’s just regurgitating the pop landscape of her youth, Rae appears more like a well-studied devotee of the pop genre, highlighting her key reference points while at the same time creating something of her own from their influence. Even amongst her obvious references, songs like “In The Rain” point to, what I hope will be the sound of AR2, in which Rae smoothes out the referencing into a body of work that is entirely her own.

The songs on the album are also unique for their lyrical themes. Instead of being largely vapid, which one might expect of Rae if they knew nothing else about her, the album features a lot of vulnerability and insecurity as well optimism in the light of some very real life tribulations. The coping mechanism of music and solitude to make it through her parents’ divorce is the subject of “Headphones On,” while her perception of “stardom as a Faustian bargain,” on “Fame Is A Gun” is one we know Rae comes to from lived experience. Then with a track like “Times Like These,” Rae is coming out the gate with an introspection that some artists don’t reach until maybe their fifth album after they’re done being everything they think others want them to be. Instead Rae is already herself, at least as much as she can be at 24.

Despite Rae releasing music for four years already, this is her first studio album. For it being her debut album, it was released through her own imprint label, As Long As I’m Dancing LLC, with exclusive licensing given for distribution through Columbia Records.

The album was co-written and produced by Elvira Anderfjärd, known for her work with Taylor Swift and Maisie Peters, and Luka Kloser, who’s worked with Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande, and Tate McRae. Both producers are signed under MxM Music, legendary pop producer Max Martin’s publishing company. Rae, Anderfjärd, and Kloser worked on the album across Los Angeles, New York, and Sweden, including recording parts of the album at Martin’s studio in Sweden. Rae’s choice to work with Martin-associated writers and producers, as well as record in Martin’s studio, shows yet another layer of Rae’s knowledge and respect for ‘00s pop. Rae’s vulnerability hidden amongst her poppier instrumentals can be linked to advice Martin gave her, “‘I had told him I struggle with talking about things that are really close to me,…’He’s like, “The only way you’re going to really push yourself [is] to say things that are true and real. Once you spill it out, you can always take it down, but if you start shallow, it’s hard to bump it up.”’”

Ahead of the album’s release, the pre-order website described it as the “first and last album” by Rae, leading to speculation that the artist will be dropping her middle name as her stage surname and going mononymous as simply Addison. Rae herself alluded to this possibility, saying in an interview to ELLE, "I feel like I’ve surpassed Addison Rae. It’s just Addison now.”

It’s hard to fit this album into a genre when so much of the album is tied together with “less a genre than a feeling,” or “the level of joie de vivre [Rae] can articulate in a song.” Of course it’s a pop record and more specifically it’s a “dream-pop soundscape” that has a very “traditionalist” perspective of pop in that Rae “loves big choruses, euphoric key changes, [and] huge builds.” But mostly the album moves through tangentially related dance-pop sounds more focused on Rae’s interest in “how that music made you feel, and how it made your body move.” Given that the album is indebted to dance music in the same way that Rae’s predecessors have been inspired by the music of the club, this album is “music you can move to, though not exactly ‘club.’” It’s a given that inspiration is being pulled, particularly on the album’s opener “New York,” from the “electroclash school of thought” that Charli XCX has ushered into mainstream pop in the last year.

As much as artists want to be seen as their own creations, no one is without their influences and no one more so than Rae. This album is, in and of itself, a “nod to pop past and present,” while still maintaining something of Rae’s own instincts. Rae and her collaborators have been adamant that they were recording “without any direct influences in mind,” but you can’t listen to this album and not think of the many different giants of pop music that have come before Rae and who echo throughout this work. Personally I think trying to downplay the extent to which Rae has been influenced by the pop girls of yesteryear is all part of the persona she’s trying to build. But she is, without a doubt, a “student of the genre’s best and brightest” and as very astute purveyor of this ‘90s and ‘00s pop nostalgia, she knows her stuff.

Across all the reviews for Rae’s album, a few names appear again and again. Yes, “Diet Pepsi” and “Summer Forever” sound like Lana, and of course she’s doing a Britney-type thing with “Money Is Everything.” On that song, she’s also shouting out the aforementioned Del Rey, as well as Lady Gaga, whose debut album The Fame (2008) served as inspiration, and Madonna, the latter of which is a major touchstone for the entire record. Madonna’s influence, particularly from her Ray of Light (1998) album can be heard specifically on “Aquamarine,” but she haunts the overall project in the use of the Korg M1 synthesiser, which was “a staple of Madonna’s house-pop crossovers in the 90s” and served as a “sonic lynchpin” for Rae’s record.

Rae’s sound has also been compared to “mostly middle of the road pop reminiscent of Disney stars gone wild,” her aesthetic to Y2K girls like Hilary Duff and Christina Aguilera, and her girlhood theme to Sofia Coppola. Even her rumored “big move” to the mononymous Addison is “reminscent of the pop icons whose art and celebrity she’s carefully studied.” But where one might see Rae’s pastiche of pop icons as unoriginal, others insist that “by borrowing, learning, and filtering it into her own, she inhabits the very core of artistry.”

Rae has been heralded as the successor to Charli XCX, evidenced by their many collaborations, starting with XCX’s feature on “2 die 4” from Rae’s 2023 EP. Rae returned the favor by featuring on the “Von Dutch” remix from last year’s brat and appearing on stage in Los Angeles, New York City, and Coachella. The album opener to Addison, “New York” is yet another homage to XCX but I think of Rae as more a spiritual successor to Lana Del Rey as opposed to XCX. “Diet Pepsi” is, of course, indebted to Del Rey and her specific brand of Americana seen on her 2012 album, Born to Die. By now at the time of this writing, Rae recently opened Del Rey’s two shows in London on July 3 and July 4, the slot being seen as a co-sign from the alt-pop star. Rae’s performance of “Money Is Everything” which features a reference to Del Rey was met with the crowd shouting the lyric back to her, and Del Rey even joined Rae on stage to sing “Diet Pepsi.” Rae’s use of “nostalgic imagery” like that of “wired headphones and a third generation iPod Nano” also place her more in the spirit of Del Rey whereas XCX’s work has often looked to the future for its aesthetics, rather than the past.

@brookarry_went crazy #lanadelrey #wembley #london #fyp #addisonrae

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I’m going to be so honest and admit what we were all thinking—I was expecting this album to be nothing more than a vanity project. I don’t think many of us were expecting any level of depth lyrically, and certainly not musically, from one of the biggest internet superstars of this new generation of social media stars. But Rae has surprised us all with this album, myself included. Rae didn’t go the sex and dating route a la Sabrina Carpenter nor did she try to prove her seriousness and emotional depth by trying a piano-led singer-songwriter thing. Sonically she’s leaning into the nostalgia for late ‘90s and early ‘00s pop music like many of her contemporaries, namely Tate McRae, but lyrically she’s speaking to her own experience, one that is very now and timely, but is ultimately timeless.

Fame is not, by any means, untread territory for an album, but Rae’s approach to this fairly common lyrical theme is unique in that it is coming from her unique lived experience. Of course the vision of fame that Rae has as a 24 year old is very young, she was a “self-made millionaire by the time she was 20,” so that is going to have an impact on her lyrics. The songs are full of the “glitzy aspects” of fame that one would expect from someone her age. But there’s something else too. Where her contemporaries like Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter “found fame before they made the transition to music,” they did so from a respected and understood legacy media background, coming from the Disney Channel. Whereas Rae came to fame as a true first-of-her-kind, where there was no predetermined playbook for anything she wanted to do and she had to make it up as she went along. There was no one who had ever been where she was or who went through exactly what she was going through, so she had to “learn how to navigate the public eye mostly on her own.” Now there’s a whole class of social media stars, specifically from TikTok, that have benefitted from the path that those like Rae and Charli D’Amelio paved. Despite all that she’s been through, she remains optimistic, even meditative in the “more melancholic scenes of the record.” But because Rae’s perspective on fame and her specific experiences with it have been hard won, “why shouldn’t [she] brag about how much money she has?”

Ever since the summer of 2023, lauded as summer of the girl, the summer of the Barbie movie and the simultaneous trifecta of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour, and Harry Styles’ Love on Tour, the idea of girlhood and its collective and individualized expression has been not only a topic of discussion, but something to be yearned for. In pop music specifically there seems to be an explosion of female singer-songwriters taking up Swift’s mantle of glitter-gel pen songs and creating this simultaneously specific and non-specific subgenre of music for girls, or that feels like girlhood. It’s one of those things where you know it when you see it. Addison feels like Rae’s attempt at entering into that subgenre. The album was celebrated for it’s “genuine girlish sincerity” and the way it “pairs high-brow sonic references with broader emotional strokes, mostly without feeling contrived,” leading it to feel “completely personal in its craftsmanship.” But album has also been noted for the “vague sadness about it,” which also feels very girl. Ultimately, it’s an album made by a young woman, deep in the “messiness of being a young woman,” which adds to the album’s opulence. “It’s modern girlhood,” said Brooke LaMantia of The Cut, “It’s wearing perfume but also being a little smelly.”

What Rae does share in common with her fellow pop girl contemporaries like Rodrigo, Carpenter, Charli XCX, and of course the queens of them all, Taylor Swift and Beyonce, is the understanding that the music alone isn’t enough anymore. In addition to “self, persona, past, present, potential” and how “all of these are part of how we consume pop stars and their music,” it’s also all about worldbuilding. Listeners don’t just want to hear music, they want to experience it. And who better to understand this than a social media star, who’s very business model is to be everywhere, on every platform, every day, all at once? But as much as Rae understands this current pop star landscape, she also has the additional hurdle that other stars-in-the-making don’t have in that her “public persona already exists [as]..the fifth most-followed person on TikTok.” While other musicians have the benefit of anonymity while making their first record and they still have time to develop how they’re going to present themselves to the world as an artist, Rae had to “do more than just make a name for herself.” She knew her work was cut out for her, that it was “incredibly important to build this world” and she set out to deliver. Shedding her “self-assured cheeky girl-next-door” perception, her ways of changing this public perception were “provocative, even if whimsical” proving that “she’s a born entertainer.” To promote her song “Aquamarine,” Rae was photographed wearing a “plastic-looking clamshell bra and electric blue fishnets as pants.” Likewise, for the video for “High Fashion,” Rae took a rumor about her and made a joke out of it, blowing “plumes of powdered sugar off a Cafe Du Monde beignet” in reference to rumors of cocaine “fueling her happy-go-lucky persona.” As much a “pop coquette” as she is a “quirked-out performance artist,” Rae’s previous life as a social media star proves she knows how to gain our attention and hold it, a skill that will serve her very well in this very saturated pop landscape.

But Rae’s worldbuilding isn’t all surface level, it’s for the benefit of the music. Rae didn’t just set out to make music on a whim, she had a vision for how she wanted her music to sound. At the heart of her vision were words like “intentional, intense, heart, and dance.” Much about Rae as an artist may be unconventional, but her “eclectic intentions are loud and clear: to create a distinctive, dreamy soundscape that brings her album moodboards to life.” Because of her understanding about this need for worldbuilding, her “tour de force of fashion and beauty collaborators, including visually stuffed videos,” help bring her intentions to fruition and “you can’t deny the record’s ability to mirror those words in a slyly sophisticated way.”

Not only does Rae’s sophisticated understanding of worldbuilding show just how much she understands the fragmented pop landscape, but also how different it is for her versus her influences or even her contemporaries. No longer is it enough for musical artists, particularly those working in pop music, and even more particularly the women in pop, to just simply be musicians, they also need to be influencers. After they make an album, they also need to promote it so they go on press tours and they make social media content to generate attention for their work. But when it’s time to make a new album, they can’t just quietly go away to make it. They need to keep the momentum of attention they have so they also have to be influencers, taking brand deals, doing movies and TV, being photographed on the street. It would make sense that for Addison Rae the transition to pop star with all of these new requirements would be easy. It was already what she was doing. But instead of the transition from musician to influencer being a necessary evil that was understood as a necessity, Rae’s “leap from influencer to credible musician” has been called “a stretch.” It seems that there will always be this “lingering snobbery” about Rae, and many who don’t think her name belongs alongside those like Carpenter, Rodrigo, Abrams, Lipa, Eilish, or McRae and perhaps they’re right. Perhaps Rae belongs in her own category, a category for artists who spring up from this need for public figures to be multi-hyphenates.

Rae’s transition from the biggest name and face on TikTok to serious pop star wasn’t exactly taken well. Her first official release in 2021, a track called “Obsessed,” co-written by Rae and producer Benny Blanco, “was, by almost all definitions, a flop.” Not even charting on the Hot 100, ironic given “all the songs she helped make famous,” one critic wrote that it would be better for Rae to “stick to lip-synching.” Even more than just the song not being accepted, Rae felt that “people weren’t ready to receive that, or me as an artist.” It was like the public were saying “How dare an influencer best known as a purveyor of corny TikTok dance trends envision herself as an actual artist worthy of any stage bigger than an iPhone?” It’s harsh, but women in the public eye have been taken down for less. It’s true that many didn’t take Rae seriously as an artist. At that time, TikTok was still “more like a provisional gimmick than a bona-fide rocket launcher.” Now, in 2025, we know better. We know that TikTok has become one of the last somewhat democratic ways of making dreams come true, where anyone from anywhere can make a video and it can be realistically possible for them to become a star from it. But we only know that now because of people like Addison Rae.

A year after her disastrous first release, Rae’s luck would turn when a horrible invasion of privacy would become a blessing in disguise. After demos of Rae’s songs that she had been working on were leaked online, she says she was “really hurt,” but then, those demos started making the rounds on the internet, and this time, to positive feedback and insistence that she release the songs. The songs, still in their roughest forms, were being called “flawless,” comparable to her idol Britney Spears, and even Charli XCX reached out to feature on one. Those songs became her first EP AR released in 2023.

Over the last year since the first single “Diet Pepsi” was released, songs from her upcoming debut album “arrived like clues, each more alluring than the last.” The slow buildup to the record did leave some feeling like they had already heard over half the album by the time it was fully out, but the final project shows a total 180 from that initial failed release. Serious about making this dream of pop stardom a reality, Rae got to work, rejected “TikTok’s ethos of oversaturation and began sharing with more intention,” and making her public appearances “very curated” and “very strategic,” I’d say Rae has been successful in her endeavor to become a bona-fide pop star. Shedding the preconceptions placed on her as an influencer, which saw her attempts at music as “an inauthentic cash grab” Rae has proven with the fact that “her evolution didn’t happen overnight” that she’s serious about this. As PR expert Sara Andréasson said for Business Insider, “She's no longer just an influencer making music — she's a pop artist who happens to come from an influencer background.”

To Rae’s credit, she’s taking this dream of being a pop star seriously and I have to admire both the desire and the effort. She’s always been smart in the sense that she knew that it wasn’t “her goal to make a living on social media forever.” She always had these other ambitions and used her social media fame as a gateway to get to where she wanted to go. And she had the hustle to work hard, she started taking acting classes and songwriting sessions as soon as her managers could get them booked. She took whatever jobs they could get for her, including the lead role in Netflix’s gener-swapped remake He’s All That (2021) which was met with negative reviews overall, but Rae was seen positively as “doing her best with a weak remake of a beloved film.” Still, the common refrain that “her place…was on TikTok, and any aspirations she had beyond that were a joke,” didn’t deter her, it just made her work harder. And when it was finally time to really focus in on these other pursuits, she took a large step back from TikTok to allow her the time to put into the work she really wanted to do. Her “ruthless pragmatism and tireless work ethic” shows in the way that she has a meticulous vision for her work, showing up to meetings with moodboards and collaborates on everything from her music to her dancing to her visuals. Working with a small team of producers gives her more control over her music, showing a genuine desire to be an artist as opposed to just wanting to be a pop star. Across everything she does, from her album visuals, to how she appears in public and in interviews, to who she collaborates with, all of it is done with meticulous effort. Addison Rae doesn’t have to do any of this. She could more easily continue to be an influencer and honestly make even more money doing that. But I believe her when she says she’s an artist. She wouldn’t put this much time and effort into changing our minds if she wasn’t serious about it. But she doesn’t expect you to just take her word for it, she won’t beg you to see her how she wishes to be seen. Instead, she says “I’ll work for it.”

As much as I would claim Rae to be the artistic successor to Lana Del Rey, it’d be impossible to examine Addison without the explicit influence of Charli XCX, on both the current pop landscape and on Rae in particular.

When XCX was accepting her Ivor Novello award for Songwriter of the Year, her comments on the craft of songwriting completely go against all conventional wisdom, but are totally on point for what it is she and her disciples are doing. She said of her own work that “some people might describe [the lyrics] as vapid and nonsensical,” but she “would unpretentiously describe it as Warholian and reflective of the cultural brain rot of our time.” And that is exactly how Rae writes her songs as well. XCX additionally said that, in her head, “a great song alone has never actually been enough to captivate an audience, but instead, a song with a distinct identity coupled with a point of view, a potent culture surrounding it, and above all, conviction is what can catapult a songwriter from being technically good to globally renowned.” Identity, point of view, culture, conviction, these are all things Rae has in spades. On the topic of conviction, XCX said it’s what “separates the frauds from the greats, the good singers from the trendsetters….It’s an undeniable sense of style and personality, and of course, it’s embracing the idea of daring to suck,…no agenda other than making something totally reflective of who you are.” We can see in Rae’s use of moodboards that making music that is reflective of who she is has always been the goal, not chasing fame or money, she already has those.

As much as did enjoy parts of this album and have no reason to root against Rae, this album is not without critique, despite what other reviewers might have you believe. Rae’s album has been largely well-received, with reviews calling it “one of the most exciting and escapist pop records of the year” and “one of the best opening statement[s] I’ve heard from a pop star.” But despite what appears to be widespread praise, this album and Rae herself have their flaws. For one, the album does appear to “show all of its tricks too early.” That’s a down-side of having so many very well-received singles, it feels like what’s left on the album to be heard on release day never quite measures up. There’s also been hopes that Rae would have “push[ed] that weirdness further.” I would agree that for as much as Addison was being celebrated for it’s avant-garde nature, it’s really just borrowing from what was avant-garde 30 years ago, but is pretty tame and par-for-the-course now. Many celebrated this record for it’s resistance to “the 2020s impulse to intellectualise every pop album and is unencumbered by ham-fisted concepts, Easter eggs or ultra-prescriptive ‘lore’ that tells listeners what to think.” But I find that is exactly what I did not like about this record. Where NME said “with little overt biography, it’s completely personal in its craftsmanship,” I have to disagree. This album says nothing beyond “stringing together vague abstractions” and I’m sorry to everyone who apparently hates “overinterpretation” but in a time where anti-intellectualism is on the rise I don’t think now is the time to be praising art that doesn’t make us have to think or work that hard to digest its meaning.

As much as I wanted to root for this album and root for Addison Rae because I do appreciate the amount of work and effort that she has put in, I find myself in a rare moment of agreeing a lot with Anthony Fantano in his assessment of this album. He writes that he’s “convinced that Addison is very much a what you see is what you artist, because I’m not finding a whole lot of subtext or layers…which would be fine if what I was getting on the surface was something I loved. It’s not.” He goes on to write about how the “record really contains no thrills or appeal or depth or excitement or substance” beyond rehashing what other artists have already done without managing “to conjure what made those eras of music so interesting and cool and fun.” I am so curious for those who celebrate Rae’s influence from other big pop artists, what makes her work different from when other artists pay homage and are said to be “reheating that artist’s nachos?”

One thing I especially appreciated about Fantano’s comments is that he acknowledges that “nobody is entirely original,” but as he says, “if you’re going to do someone else’s shtick entirely, at least sell me on it.” He then draws a comparison to Sabrina Carpenter, Rae’s contemporary, and how Carpenter is guilty of many of the same critiques he is making of Rae, but the difference is, with Carpenter, “she’s actually putting some personality into it. You can feel the character in the performance. It’s also a lot of the time employed to be funny.” My particular issue with Rae is that she wants us to take her seriously, fair enough, but she doesn’t give us anything to hang our hats on. I don’t know who she is. At least with the character that Carpenter is doing, I know who that character is supposed to be and it’s something I can latch onto in order to understand her work. Ultimately, Fantano and I are in agreement that this album says very little and there are just too many other artists out there, “writing far more personal songs…[that] just bring a lot more to the table than this.”

It can be easy when there’s such an overwhelming positive feel for an album to get swept up in that and hold strong to your critiques, as Fantano does. He fights back against this homogenous groupthink and writes “I’m not going to come on here and pretend otherwise just to be in line with the pop elite and fans pushing this record right now.” Which brings me again to what I believe the role of music critics should be. Just as Fantano acknowledges that “coming out with your own album is an achievement in and of itself,” and he highlights the “great potential that the album we’ve heard…is laying the groundwork for for what could be a really great and impressive career, and hopefully a lot of creative growth into the future, but that is not the album we are being faced with right now.” As critics and journalists, we all want the same things as the artists—for there to be great music made and put out into the world. And with that aim in mind, I am always on the artist’s side. I want them to make the best music they possibly can, but that means having to point out and highlight where I think they’ve missed the mark, and where I think they need to go back and change some things. Just universally praising something without critique isn’t helping anyone. That said, I also think we can learn how to critique with the best of intentions and not punch down.

I am also finding an interesting double-standard being applied to Rae that has not been the case for her fellow contemporaries, particularly the women. Many seem to be okay with Rae being “unknowable.” They’re okay with Rae revealing hardly anything of herself in her songwriting that we didn’t already know about her. They say she’s “simply having fun” and “keeps things relatively light.” The aesthetics of the album don’t let us in to her inner world in any real way beyond her “pretty generic feelings”, but that’s okay because it’s more “like a sonic mood board, not a cohesive statement about an artist.” I can understand why Rae might be hesitant to really let us in to any real feeling she has or to let us know the real her in any way. She’s seen, as we all have, what the public will do with any in they are given to a public figure’s personal life. Given an inch, they will take a mile and with that mile, public sentiment will eventually, inevitably, turn. We’ve seen time and time again how “overexposure and unending scrutiny” eventually lead to downfall and yet, we’ve never learned our lesson. Why haven’t we been okay with artists in the past keeping their personal lives this close to the vest? Why have we clamored for every detail of Taylor Swift’s or Sabrina Carpenter’s dating life, or made incessant comments on Ariana Grande’s body, but with Addison Rae, she’s allowed to be “unknowable?” Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating for Addison Rae to get picked apart the way her predecessors have. I’m just hoping this new attitude of allowing artists to be “unknowable” extends to artists already picked apart and we allow them to just be.

Finally, I’m conflicted over Addison Rae’s authenticity. On one hand, her musical inspirations and what vulnerability she does choose to reveal in her songwriting all point to a real sense of identity and authenticity. I want to believe her. But then I see videos of her live performances and I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it feels disingenuous. I know her former life as a cheerleader and her coming-up on the internet lends to this, but the constant smiling through her singing makes it feel like a performance during the talent portion of a pageant.

@yazzy.starrmiss gorgeous, live in london baby !#livemusic #newmusic #addison #ontour #addisonrae

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

It feels like the layers of performance are very thin, she knows she’s performing and she knows that the audience knows she’s performing. And while other artists have attempted this thin veil of performance to make a larger point, it doesn’t feel like that’s what Rae is doing here. Honestly, it just seems like inexperience, like she wasn’t ready for the live performance aspect of this crossover to pop star as much as she was with the album. It’s like she hasn’t decided what her artistic persona is going to be yet.

That said, she has her celebrity persona down pat. Granted, she’s had a lot longer to work on that one. And I am deliberate in separating her celebrity persona from her artistic one. All artists have a persona regardless of industry, but what industry that artist is in will dictate more about the construction of their persona. We see actors take on a persona, which is different than a character they play. It’s seen in how they are styled, in what events they appear at, how they appear on social media, where they’re photographed out in public, and how they act in press interviews. Their persona is constructed of what anecdotes they tell from set, how much of their personal lives they choose to share, what little details about their childhood, personal pet social issue, or favorite niche interest they’re willing to talk about for five minutes on a talk show. All of that constructs a persona that’s preferably relatable and down to earth that audiences feel they can connect with, a likable person that’s there underneath all the different characters they play, including and especially important for the unlikable ones.

Persona for musicians are constructed similarly, but for different ends. Musical personas are often to add character and mystique beyond the music. We don’t want to think that the character we hear in the music is different than the person standing in front of us at a live gig or a cd signing. Rae, in her studies of the pop genre, understands how “celebrity can be an art, if you do it right” and she has tried very carefully to conflate her celebrity persona into an artist persona.

Where she once shared everything online as a means of building her online personality, she is now pulling back, becoming more intentional and sparse about what she posts online and withholding details of her personal life so that she can build intrigue and mystique. Instead of thinking of herself as a first-of-her-kind internet star, she’s modeling her story around classic Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe, who were picked off the street and made famous. Her purposeful attempt to smooth out her Southern accent, saying she wants to be “prim and poised…Marilyn Monroe never said ‘y’all’” and her playlist of songs by Madonna, Prince, Marilyn Monroe, and Kate Bush which she played in the car during her feature interview for Rolling Stone all point to her pointing to us how she wishes to be seen. She wants us to see her as this “Norma Jean-to-Marilyn Monroe” type of reinvention. Her self-mythology hinges on us seeing her as an “aw, shucks!…excited puppy wagging its tail,” country girl next door before she re-emerges like Bad Sandy at the end-of-year carnival. It’s the classic Britney Spears playbook where she went from sweet country girl on the cover of …Baby One More Time (1999) to red latex jumpsuit. That’s why every “public appearance, red carpet look, and new song reveal[s] another layer.” That’s why, as much as I want to believe Rae, I’m not sure I can.

Ultimately while not a lot, the fact that Rae reveals anything on this album, like thoughts on her parents’ divorce or her worries about fame, is a surprise. What easily could have been a phoned-in project, written by others with Rae’s vocals put on top, is instead an album full of tiny glimpses into “the star’s more complex innermost thoughts” revealed in “only a line or two in each track,” but are interspersed “insightful moments” amongst the rest of the album, making them a “welcome reprieve from the sparkly hedonism.”

While we’ve heard music from Rae before and have already seen an evolution from her earliest releases to this, this is her official debut album, meaning that she needs room to grow. I’m always hesitant to laud debuts too highly lest it adds undue pressure to the artist in their second album process, which is already well known to be amongst the toughest periods as an artist. I’ve held this concern since Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album Sour (2021), which it seems like she followed up just fine, and I’ve thought this about mk.gee’s recent debut. My fear for them is that the public’s, and particularly critics’, fervent love for them right out the gate is going to create a lose/lose situation in which they either essentially recreate their first album, to which everyone boos for unoriginality or phoning it in, or they take a risk and go a completely new direction which then listeners lament and yearn for the first album again. While this album is interesting, more so than I think a lot of people were expecting, it is still deeply steeped in references and homage. I’d like to hear more how these inspirations and influences settle into Rae’s sound to create something that is truly hers. But with this album and songs like “Aquamarine” being labeled “a classic in the making” and cementing “her status as a major new pop talent,” I’m already bracing for the whiplash of critique that will inevitably come with her next release. She may be the pop darling for now, but the turning of the popular opinion tide eventually comes for one and all.