NEW YORK (AP) — The pop album of the summer is here. Addison Rae’s debut, “Addison,” is full, stuffed with bejeweled, hypnotic pop songs for the post-“BRAT” crowd. Hedonism has a new hero.
For those who’ve watched her rise, it’s almost impossible to believe. It wasn’t so long ago – almost exactly a year into the COVID-19 pandemic – that a young Rae went on “The Tonight Show” and taught its host Jimmy Fallon a few stiff, meme-able TikTok dance moves, then what made up the bulk of her career. It was met with almost immediate backlash, as is common for young women with viral posts. But she wielded it like a weapon: Social media celebrity begat acting roles for Rae, then a coveted collaboration with Charli XCX in the form of a “Von Dutch” remix, and now, at age 24, her final form: becoming the hyper-ambitious, hyper-femme pop star for the current moment.
As a full body of work, “Addison” taps into the genre-agnostic zeitgeist, where pop music appears edgy and elastic. The songs speak for themselves, from the pitch-shifted trip-hop “Headphones On” and the snapped percussion, minor chords, NSFW lyrics and vanishing synths of “High Fashion” to the Madonna “Ray of Light”-cosplay “Aquamarine” atop a house beat and its chantable, spoken chorus: “The world is my oyster / Baby, come touch the pearl / The world is my oyster / And I’m the only girl.”
Humor and girlhood are intertwined with less of a Sabrina Carpenter-wink and more of cheery irony. “Money loves me,” she yells on “Money Is Everything.” “I’m the richest girl in the world!” Then, a giggle and a kiss. (“Girl,” to this writer’s count, is uttered 20 times across the album. Across its 12 tracks, she is both the divine feminine and the girl next door. Often, they are one in the same.)
Rae isn’t reinventing the wheel here, but she is carefully pulling from her inspirations. Her story recalls Britney Spears: The pair are from Louisiana, became famous young, and recorded their unique, sensual, layered pop music in Stockholm, Sweden, in and around super producer Max Martin. There’s the earned Lana Del Rey parity, like in the “Born to Die”-channeling “Diet Pepsi,” echoes of Charli in the bouncy opener “New York,” and tinges of ethereal Enya production on the dreamy “Summer Forever.”
For “Addison,” Rae partnered with two primary collaborators – Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd, who goes simply by Elvira – an unusually small team for a major label pop release. But that intimacy is one of the album’s superpowers, a sensibility that teeters between close mic recordings and big late-night anthems. In the latter case, look no further than “Fame Is a Gun,” an easy song-of-the-summer contender, a sunglasses-in-the-club banger with synthetic vocal textures and an unignorable chorus.
In the lead up to the release of “Addison,” Rae has positioned her early TikTok fame as a means to an end. There aren’t many avenues to Hollywood from Lafayette, Louisiana, and social media, for some, is a democratizing tool. Rae used her dance training to build a name for herself on the platform, something that has no doubt laid an ideal foundation for pop superstardom – just consider how Justin Bieber did something similar with covers on YouTube not so many years ago. It feels full circle, then, that Rae’s stellar debut album aims to do what her videos on TikTok attempted to do, what she’s always wanted to do — dance, and get others to dance, too.
