The Emancipation of Addison Rae

The TikTok star's debut album breaks with the past.

- MUSIC / CRAIG JENKINS

THE INFLUENCER-POP sphere is a graveyard peppered with more misfires than successful conversions of internet cachet into hits. The machine that helped Troye Sivan and Benson Boone evolve also yields terrible singles by the likes of controversial beauty-industry personality James Charles. When 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; listeners assumed the TikTok 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 can become currency. On her 2023 EP, AR, she worked with up to five co-writers per song as well as 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 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 leaning into her first name. Her parents, frequent fixtures in her early content, are out of the picture. Addison documents a 24-year-old budding artist coolly working out what to sing and write about. Unlike her EP, the album is largely the work of just 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 in one another and relative freedom from industry veterans’ nagging, predictable oversight.