How Addison Rae Went from TikTok to the Pop Charts
In 2021, the TikTok star Addison Rae released her début single, “Obsessed.” It’s a whispery electro-pop tune about either unapologetic narcissism or chirpy self-confidence—it’s hard to say which. “I’m obsessed with me as much as you / Say you’d die for me, I’d die for me too,” Rae pants on the chorus. The track, co-produced by Benny Blanco, was a great big dud, even despite Rae’s colossal fan base. Back then, TikTok seemed more like a provisional gimmick than a bona-fide rocket launcher; it was harder to imagine an app-born phenom finding genuine purchase on the pop charts. That Rae’s vocals were processed into bloodless oblivion didn’t help. “People weren’t ready to receive that, or me as an artist, which is completely understandable,” Rae, who is twenty-four, said in a recent interview.
This month, Rae released “Addison,” her first full-length album, which is positioned to become one of the summer’s marquee offerings, the sort of thing you’ll hear blaring out of idling cars and tinny Bluetooth speakers from now until late September. It’s a gasping, libidinous collection of seductive and periodically inventive dance-pop tracks, anchored less by Rae’s voice (she has not backed down on the filters) than by her presence as a gently debauched girl next door. The animating tension here is between Rae and herself: what she wants and what she’ll do to get it.
Perhaps the most transformative thing that happened to Rae between the releases of “Obsessed” and “Addison” is that she began collaborating with the hyperpop icon Charli XCX, who first contributed a verse to “2 die 4,” a track from “AR,” Rae’s 2023 EP. The song is only two minutes long—it’s about a booty call—but there’s something compellingly arch and fiendish about Rae’s delivery: “Go left at the light, then pull over on the right / So come take a bite in the middle of the night,” she sings, her voice breathy. In general, Rae is uninhibited when it comes to her desires—sex, in the case of “2 die 4,” though more often she’s pining for fame. “Have you ever dreamt of bein’ seen? / Not by someone, more like in a magazine,” she sings on “High Fashion,” a new song. That Rae bothers to make the distinction between what we might assume she means (that she wishes to be understood by another person) and what she is actually after (anonymous mass adulation) is very funny, but also crucial to her entire philosophy. Like legions of pop stars before her, including Charli XCX, she understands that celebrity itself can be an art, if you do it right.
Rae and Charli collaborated again in 2024, when Rae was featured on the A. G. Cook-produced remix of “Von Dutch,” a song about popularity, pettiness, and being shitty on the internet. Charli is exceptionally good at reiterating her own notoriety via a kind of defiant strut, smirking in the face of jealous losers; Rae is not nearly as convincing in this mode, but something about her wholesomeness works as a foil to Charli’s cockiness. (Rae occasionally joined Charli onstage during her most recent tour; watching them together is dissonant and captivating, like seeing the head cheerleader hanging with the girl who ripped endless American Spirits under the bleachers before moving to New York for art school.) The “Von Dutch” remix is lighter and airier than the original. There’s a moment when Rae lets out a sustained, high-pitched squeal that I initially mistook for a synthesizer. It is incongruous and unexpected, and it is sick.
Rae’s work with Charli inched her closer to being cool, an honorific that has heretofore mostly eluded the TikTok set, in part because relentlessly filming yourself on a phone is inherently uncool—even if tech companies tell us the future exists exclusively on a screen, even if being good at it can make you extremely wealthy. To me, Rae’s popularity among the Dimes Square set is evocative of normcore, an invented aesthetic that involves wearing—wait for it—normal clothing. There’s something both inevitable and devastating about the fetishization of the ordinary, particularly in the context of a grim and unsteady world. Rae’s civilian appeal is so plain that, eventually, it became fascinating.
Rae joined TikTok in 2019, while she was living in Baton Rouge and studying broadcast journalism at Louisiana State University. As a teen, she danced competitively, and she has a winsome, chipper presence onscreen, whether lip-synching a scene from a movie or moonwalking with Jason Derulo; she has amassed almost ninety million followers on the platform, making her, at present, the fifth most popular TikToker in the world. Formally dissecting the mechanics of social-media prominence feels silly—there’s only so much parsing one can engage in before boomeranging back to the fact that some people are just exceptionally hot. Yet Rae does possess an unusual magnetism. When she’s messing around with a new lip gloss, or doing a goofy little dance with her mom, I occasionally experience a fleeting but overwhelming sense of peace, as though perhaps everything is going to be O.K. In 2025, that feeling, however specious or temporary, is potent cultural currency.
Though Rae’s brand is cheerful—there aren’t many lovesick ballads on “Addison,” merely flashes of pathos amid a steady stream of affirmations about how fun it is to have money and status and a suntan and cute clothes—she has weathered a few controversies. She once posted a photo of herself wearing a white bikini featuring the words “FATHER,” “SON,” and “HOLY SPIRIT” (you can imagine the placement), setting off an avalanche of moral panic; commenters screamed blasphemy and threatened the wrath of God. The swimsuit was by the cult fashion line Praying, which makes ugly, irreverent clothes featuring statements like “I’ll talk to God when I’m Dead.” Rae quickly deleted the post. Her brand is too earnest to accommodate irony or camp. The same problem repeats itself on “Addison.” A verse on “High Fashion” is lewd in a way that reminds me of how I assumed interesting and edgy grownups must speak to one another back when I was a teen-ager—just saying whatever crazy stuff they wanted:
The single “Diet Pepsi,” which Rae wrote with Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd, sounds like a cross between Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” and much of Lana Del Rey’s output circa “Born to Die”: the reverb-heavy vocals, the gauzy production, a sensual yet melancholic vibe. (In 2012, Del Rey released a song titled “Diet Mountain Dew,” and has, at various points, made lyrical references to gold chains, bluejeans, the redness of cherries in the spring, and how, “in the car, in the car, in the backseat, I’m your baby”—all images that reëmerge on “Diet Pepsi.”) Last month, Del Rey posted an eighteen-second video of herself listening to “Diet Pepsi” while periodically holding her hand to her mouth, in a gesture of shyness or maybe bewilderment. Fans mostly received the clip as an endorsement; to me, it seemed as though Del Rey was just trying not to laugh. The line between artful homage and mimicry is, of course, quite thin. On “Money Is Everything,” a song about being rich, Rae shouts out her predecessors: “Please, d.j., play Madonna / Wanna roll one with Lana / Get high with Gaga.”
The best tracks here—“Headphones On,” “Aquamarine,” “Fame Is a Gun”—are less obviously indebted to the semi-recent past, and more rooted in Rae’s rarefied point of view. On “Headphones On,” a feathery R. & B. song, she briefly mourns her parents’ divorce (“Wish my mom and dad could’ve been in love”) before shaking it off (“Guess I gotta accept the pain”). The vocals are pitch-shifted and wavy, and the production has a rosy, druggy quality—Rae is as buoyant as ever, but “Headphones On” still feels like a sinking stone. It’s a pleasant drift downward—in part because we know that Rae will soon reappear, flip her hair, and pull us back up. ♦
