Why 'Addison' Works

The debut record from former TikTok star Addison Rae is both slickly made and subtly genius.

Why do we listen to pop music? It’s a genre that, as its name (an abbreviation of ‘popular’) suggests, has a great reach across varying tastes, and can, at least in an idealistic world, bring people together. It packages big emotions into digestible choruses and hooks – as though it were an aural Nutribullet. It soundtracks so many of our Big Life Moments: the first kiss in the club, the drive down the coast, the wedding reception. Pop is full of dichotomies and contradictions, too; it’s built on formulae yet has the capacity to surprise and startle. Pop is both mirror and escape; it tells us who we are and who we could be. It exists in worlds neither happy nor sad, merely emotional on a full and rich palette. Pop is human.

With all these in mind, Addison Rae is undoubtedly suited for pop music. Indeed, her new record, Addison, at first scans as a laundry list of pop album essentials. Arena-sized hooks? Tick. Bouncy, slick production? Tick. Lyrics that are at times so absurd they circle back around to profundity? Tick. Name the album after yourself? Tick. On paper, Addison should’ve come and gone like many a pop release. Then again, like its creator, Addison is not like many a pop release. It’s idiosyncratic – weird, even – without ever being too out there to turn off the casual listener. It plays with its form and the conventions of pop, without ever abandoning either entirely. It’s subtly genius, in the same way that eating cheese and pineapple together is genius, or that an impulsive trip to egg your ex’s house is genius. Clever in an subversive way – but clever regardless.

Rae in the video for ‘Headphones On’

Many underestimated Rae at first; some still do. Her journey from TikTok blonde girl to popstar was facilitated by a sophistication of her public image. She listened to SOPHIE. She was an avid reader. She was, with millions of followers still in the bank, a diva. Her 2021 single, ‘Obsessed’, was (perhaps unfairly) maligned by critics, who saw it as another cheap and soulless cash grab from a TikTok star with brand partnerships drying up. (Rae’s fellow Hype House member, Dixie D’Amelio, released several singles the year prior to ‘Obsessed’, none of which were very good.)

Listening back to ‘Obsessed’ now, it truly holds up: it’s a winkingly ironic self-empowerment anthem, whose camp qualities Rae would lean into further with future releases. The critics, though – supposedly swayed by their view of Rae as just another basic blonde girl – dismissed her. It wasn’t until 2022, when several of Rae’s demos leaked online, that different people started to embrace her for different reasons. She was no longer the white girl doing dances in a big house; now, she was singing on top of old Gaga demos and making properly good pop music. (In hindsight, it’s warming to consider that supporters of Rae’s early music were terminally online queers; I don’t doubt she felt a kinship with their otherness.) Bolstered by last year’s hit single, ‘Diet Pepsi’, she won over the public. All of a sudden, it was cool to like Addison Rae.

Despite this success, though, Rae still has her naysayers; there’s a snobbery and cynicism, undoubtedly rooted at least somewhat in misogyny, around her and her music. In particular, many have questioned her ‘authenticity’ – that annoyingly crucial selling point in music these days – and are sceptical over whether Rae’s music was truly her doing, or was just the result of intense focus-grouping.

Addison, then, arrives with its work cut out for it. It more than dispels any notion that Rae is a puppet for a corporate agenda, or that her heart isn’t in this to any degree. The music here is too colourful, too brimming with personality and charm, to be the handiwork of someone who wasn’t intensely passionate. No, it’s not perfect, but I’d take that over the polished drivel of fellow Hype House alumna Alex Warren’s ‘Ordinary’. Across this whole record, Rae sounds like she’s having immense fun, imbuing the music with infectious warmth and wit. Ironically enough, it’s about as authentic a work as she could have made: cheeky, charming, and utterly beguiling.

If Addison has a theme, it’s change, taking a leap of faith – whether being pushed or making the step yourself – the reasons why, and the consequences. It’s a theme exemplified chiefly in ‘Aquamarine’: “I’m transforming and realigning,” she sings, a bird caged for far too long, “I’m ready to fly.” For Rae, the theme of transformation is indelibly personal, as she’s grown up and come into her own before our eyes. The theme of change takes a darker, more mature turn in the record’s back half, when Rae examines how fame has transformed her life for better and for worse. ‘In The Rain’, a swirling, string-laden cut, has her holding a mirror to her audience as she considers how she’s perceived; the punchy, menacing ‘Fame is a Gun’ turns the mirror back on herself. She eventually relishes the newfound attention: “When you shame me / It makes me want it more.”

Also rife across the record is the glow of new love; the Lana-esque ‘Summer Forever’ is a spiritual sequel to ‘Diet Pepsi’, with Rae’s gorgeous, feather-light falsetto glistening over sunset harmonies and percussion magpied from a Lust for Life cut. If it never quite manages to escape Lana pastiche, it makes for no less of an enveloping listen. It’s ‘Diet Pepsi’, though, that is truly intoxicating, a winning blend of killer melodies, whispered vocal layers and glimmering synths. She sings as though she’s an alien discovering what love is in real time: “Say you love me,” she coos to a man who’ll probably ruin her life in a month or two, “losing all my innocence in the backseat.”

Rae in the video for ‘Times Like These’

Smartly, Rae casts herself as the young girl in love, that old Lana stereotype that she seeks to subvert and add dimension to. Sure, she’s materialistic, as showcased in the gloriously camp ‘Money is Everything’, an anthem for rich jobless twenty-somethings on the East Side set across and loves boys and partying, that’s also driven by addictive hip-hop production. And true, she loves to fuck it up at the club, too; glorious opener ‘New York’, contender for the album’s single best moment, sets Rae’s big-city dreams against a UK dance beat that could’ve plausibly been the handiwork of Jamie xx. (It also handily contains one of the funniest lines of the record: “Drop my bags at the Bowery Hotel / Next stop to the club, I’m a dance whore.” She knows you think she’s just a stupid TikTok girl, but she plays into the joke while giving you a glimpse into her fabulous life. Her mind!)

But she’s also wiser than you think. An undercurrent of the whole album, intriguingly, is doom, and what it means to persevere in the face of it. TikTok, Rae’s second home, documents the horrifying world we live in as well as its bright spots; you could easily, in one session, view footage of a genocide and a Beyoncé concert, an authoritative world leader and an Alison Hammond compilation, right alongside each other. To me, Addison at least partially mirrors that jarring for-you-page contradiction between apocalypse and joy; it opens with party anthem ‘New York’, whose hedonistic lyrics subtly convey a disillusionment with home and a reliance on substances to get through anxiety and change. Closer ‘Headphones On’ does this more explicitly, with the titular metaphor enabling Rae to shut out the world. The verses toss out her melancholy visions – “Wish my mom and dad could have been in love” – while the chorus finds her surrendering to it all. “I still get dolled up,” she sings; if the world’s ending, you might as well have your best mascara on.

This isn’t to say that listening to Addison is anything other than a joyful experience. Not only does she remain gamely optimistic about the future (after all, as she herself observes, life’s no fun through clear waters – we need a bit of drama!), she also bakes every inch of her persona into the music. On some songs she’s sincere, earnest and trusting (‘Diet Pepsi’, ‘Summer Forever’); on others, she’s flippant, free and gleeful (‘New York’, ‘Money is Everything’, ‘High Fashion’). Addison works because she sounds extraordinarily committed to the bit, restlessly energetic and free-spirited.

Rae announcing the release date of her then-unannounced debut album at Arca’s Coachella set, April 13

Then again, if she were to read all this, Rae would probably tell me I’m thinking about it too hard. Simply put, Addison is great fucking pop music, meticulously produced by Rae’s all-women team of Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser. Even among the record’s stylistic swerves (UK dance on ‘New York’, Y2K pop on ‘Aquamarine’, R&B flavours on ‘Headphones On’), the consistency in personnel helps ensure it’s all coherent, with Rae’s gossamer, angelic tones gluing the pieces together. It’s both pretty and poppy enough that it rarely strays from a playlist-friendly sound, yet to call it music fit purely for a playlist would be to belie its sheer excellence. Rae and her team channel disparate influences that cohere into a singular vision, without ever mimicking those influences fully. That’s the key to unlocking Addison; it’s equally a statement of intent for Rae’s persona as it is for her vision of pop music.

The record’s slender thirty-three minute duration is lined with details and quirks that reveal themselves on repeated listens. The chocolate-dark, chainsawing synths of ‘High Fashion’, which wouldn’t sound out of place on Selena Gomez’s Revival (and reminds you of that record’s sly charm that’s sorely missing from her recent output). The intimacy created by the vocal layering in ‘Diet Pepsi’ and ‘In The Rain’, as though Rae’s whispering in your ear. The unabashed bop that is ‘Fame is a Gun’. The rhyming of ‘last’ with ‘last’ in the bridge of ‘Summer Forever’. The way she beams, in ‘Money is Everything’, “the girl I used to be is still the girl inside of me!”, as though honouring her former selves by way of celebrating her newfound freedom.

References range from explicit (the footprints of Lana and Madonna are more than passing) to uncanny and surprising (is it just me who hears the melody of Eiffel 65’s ‘Blue’ in the piano refrain of ‘In The Rain’?), and through it all the approach is considered and clever. Essentially, Rae’s throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, except she’s not throwing it with too much force, her aim is precise, and pretty much all of what she throws does in fact stick.

With the Y2K referencing in her music and visuals, much of the conversation around Rae has subsequently positioned her either as the next Britney (though Rae’s work is weirder, and crucially she has more creative control), or a Madonna descendent. In particular, comparisons have been made to Ray of Light, Madonna’s 1998 electronica opus. I get it in terms of sound – there’s more than a flicker of it on the trip-hop ‘Times Like These’ – but in terms of sheer unbridled spirit, I’d argue that Music, one album later in the Ciccone discography, is a closer touchstone. Music set Madonna’s identity apart from a world of pop homogeneity, and is a true ‘headphones album’ full of sonic treats. Addison is the same.

It’d be a disservice to Rae’s talents, though, to solely compare her work to other women trailblazers. The fact is that Addison, though imperfect (the two interludes feel more window-dressing than properly necessary, and I have reservations over some of the lyrics on ‘Money is Everything’), truly establishes Rae’s unique voice, and is that rare debut that feels fully formed as it arrives. It’s a concerted, serious effort to take everything less seriously, and it’s an effort that’s been pulled off so successfully to the extent that her critics are sharper and more cynical than ever. (To quote Pitchfork, who wrote a positive review of her single ‘High Fashion’: “she makes not trying look easy.”)

With Addison, the singer isn’t trying to make a grand statement; the record isn’t radical or groundbreaking except in its existence as an Addison Rae record. Instead, it asserts Rae’s place in the pop canon – not necessarily silencing her detractors, but instead playing the music loud enough it drowns them out. She seems resigned to the fact that she probably won’t win anyone else over, too: “Misunderstood but I’m not gonna sweat it,” she sighs on ‘In The Rain’. Here, she’s self-aware without being self-conscious. In other words, she’s a pop star.

Trying to explain why Addison works would be like trying to explain why you keep texting your ex back, or why the raspberries you bought yesterday have already gone mouldy. With some explaining (see the entire review before this sentence), one might come to a rational conclusion. But I’m sure Rae would agree that it’s better for everyone if you switch your brain off and put your headphones on. Handily, in ‘Fame is a Gun’, she offers a tip to anyone looking to digest her work: “Don’t ask too many questions / That is my one suggestion.” My lips are sealed, and my ears are open.

9/10