Futureproofing #18: On Addison Rae

"Addison" is one of the year's best pop albums, and it should appeal to dance music heads—even the snobby ones.

Edited by Tom Gledhill

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past six months, you've probably heard at least one Addison Rae song. Maybe the earwormy, Lana Del Rey-lite "Diet Pepsi," or the Ray Of Light worship of "Aquamarine" (which is so literal that the track includes the lyric "I'm a ray of light"). Through savvy marketing, humorously salacious music videos and, most importantly, great pop songs, her debut LP Addison looks to be the Brat of this year—but more pure pop and less confession. Like Brat, Addison expertly weaves together strands of dance music and club culture from years past with an expertise that can only come from someone who truly loves music. It's like record collector rock for crossover electronic music from 1997 through 2013, sold with a mixture of real conviction and irony that makes it hard to know where one begins and the other ends. In other words, it's perfect pop music, nothing less, nothing more. And if you like dance music, you should listen to it, even if pop isn't usually your thing. Here's why.

Before she made her first couple false starts in music, Rae was best known as an early TikTok star. Her viral dance videos earned her spots on late night TV and a whopping 88 million followers, which makes her the sixth most-followed person on the entire app. In a fascinating and honest interview with The New York Times' Popcast, she spoke about her desperation to use social media as a way to escape Lafayette, Louisiana, which included taking paltry fees of $20 from record labels to promote music with her videos.

But Rae wanted to make her own music. Her first attempt, the Benny Blanco-produced "Obsessed," was so ridiculed and reviled that her planned album was shelved, and her musical career left in limbo. But the so-generic-it's-kind-of-good "Obsessed" struck a chord with a certain kind of fan—specifically, the voracious, terminally online gay music fan—creating a cult following that only grew with a succession of leaked demos. (If there's anything a pop music gay loves, it's a diva with a vault of unfinished songs they can covet and trade like precious gems.)

Over time, and with some further career moves (acting, cosmetics, fragrances), something shifted. Her 2023 debut EP AR, was meant to close the chapter started by "Obsessed." But with renewed interest in her music, and Charli xcx in her corner, Rae was greeted with goodwill and curiosity. AR is admittedly not the greatest music I've ever heard, though it did have "2 Die 4," a gloriously deadpan paean to her own body and sex appeal that predicted the detached cool of Addison. Then came THAT scream, and suddenly she was part of the cool girl's club (and the Grammy nominees club).

Right before the "Von Dutch" remix came out, Rae hooked up with Luka Kloser and Elvira, two members of Max Martin's songwriting and production camp MxM Productions. They famously wrote "Diet Pepsi" the day they met, and set to work on Rae's first album. Their chemistry is obvious, and is a key part of the album's appeal. The whole thing was made by three women in the same mid-20s age group with seemingly little interference or outside influence from the meddling major label system. In a Variety video about the making of "Headphones On," the group joke that they sent the song to a male producer to see if he had any ideas, and ultimately rejected what he sent back. ("Diet Pepsi" was originally also credited to Max Martin, though his name has since been removed.)

The irresistible—and undeniably silly—"Diet Pepsi" was what it took for everyone else to take her seriously. Built on a quivering synth borrowed from the depths of late '00s R&B, with a breathy vocal worthy of Born To Die-era Lana, the lyrics are simple and still eyebrow-raising ("losing all my innocence in the backseat"). The video has so many layers of irony—retro Americana for people who feel like 2011 was ancient history, plus a man licking whipped cream off her feet—that its flimsiness becomes its weightiness. Oh, and a truly bizarre key change after a false ending, moving the song down half a step rather than up.

"Diet Pepsi" was followed by a string of singles delivered with even funnier videos, like the grittier-looking "Aquamarine," where she smokes two cigarettes at once, or "High Fashion," where she licks plates of powder, then covers her entire body in it and licks that, too. For my money, the best was "Headphones On"—which might be my favorite song of the year so far—a downtempo trip-hop cut whose video has her working at the frozen-food store Iceland, before daydreaming about riding horseback through the real Iceland with bright pink hair while she's on her cigarette break.

While "Diet Pepsi" is an S-tier pop song, "Headphones On" is when things really clicked for me. The track is a blend of Homogenic-era Björk and the bouncy-but-melancholy Madonna of "Nothing Really Matter." The lyrics are alternately funny ("I need a cigarette to make me feel better") but also surprisingly vulnerable, where she talks about feeling jealous of the "new it girl," and also, drops the bomb, "Wish my mom and dad could have been in love." The song's genius is finished off by a lolling organ line that pushes up against the verses like water splashing against the side of a boat listing in a lazy river.

Those little lyrical details add up to a record that feels hyper-personal, even when she's spouting clichés or being silly. Opener "New York" is a gloriously earnest tribute to the city—the chorus is "I love New York" over and over—which includes stunners like "Kick drum / Chew gum" and "I'm a dance whore." On "Fame Is A Gun," she sounds like she's trying to convince herself of her own fame, singing "You got a front row seat / And I got a taste of the glamorous life" with an icy distance that perfectly channels the decadent electro-freakout of Britney Spears' Blackout album.

The Spears comparison is an instructive one. Though the album's sounds are clearly influenced by Madonna and Lana Del Rey—who are mentioned by name on the "Material Girl"-riffing "Money Is Everything"—so much of Addison's career mirrors Britney, from the husky vocals to the competitive dancing to the sometimes cutting lyrics, or, again, irony, hidden by an otherwise stone-faced delivery. On songs like "Fame Is A Gun," Rae is in on the joke as much as anyone else. But it's also not just a joke.

The other thing about Addison is that it just sounds good. It avoids the maximalist, compressed-to-oblivion tunnel vision of most non-Charli club pop in favor of a rich world of synths and drum breaks that are clearly the work of people with at least a little background in dance music. And the references feel endless. "Times Like These," another downcast banger, has clear echoes of Madonna's 2000 Music LP in its melody, specifically how it sounds upbeat and downcast at the same time—when club music becomes a lifeline and a vehicle for expression, not just escape. "High Fashion"'s careening, seasick leads bear an obvious resemblance to early James Blake and Mount Kimbie, the kind of melodies that threaten to knock the song off course. "In The Rain," with its chunky piano runs, channels late '90s Eurodance and liquid drum & bass all in one, with a sense of melodrama that makes Rae's mawkish chorus ("So I cry / Only in the rain") feel almost profound in its sentimentality.

I could go on about the details of this album, which is remarkable considering it's only 33-minutes and 10 songs long (two are interludes). That also plays in its favor: there's almost no filler, there's not a single clunker, and all the songs add up to a sense of excitement and hunger tempered by a desire to be cool that you can totally see through—which, in turn, makes it unusually relatable. On Addison, Rae doesn't hide her insecurities, but she also doesn't hide that she's cool as hell. She doesn't care what you think, except when she does.

That mix of contradictions is what makes Addison ideal pop music. It's as deep as you want it to be, or as simple as you need it to be. It's rich in sonic detail with a cinematic scope, even if that scope is maybe more '00s rom-com than anything else. Above all, it reminds me of some of pop music's great auteurs. Specifically Madonna's Music album—the last time she was at the top of the world, making music that was genius at one turn ("Don't Tell Me") and lovably goofy ("Impressive Instant") the next. Addison Rae probably isn't the next Madonna, but I don't think she's trying to be—she's a bit humbler, more sarcastic, and more down-to-earth, qualities that will take her exactly as far as she wants to go. For now, she’s made the best pop album of the year so far.