NEW YORK (AP) — The pop album of the summer time is right here. Addison Rae’s debut, “Addison,” is full, filled with bejeweled, hypnotic pop songs for the post-“BRAT” crowd. Hedonism has a brand new hero.
For many who’ve watched her rise, it’s nearly unimaginable to imagine. It wasn’t so way back – nearly precisely a yr into the COVID-19 pandemic – {that a} younger Rae went on “The Tonight Show” and taught its host Jimmy Fallon a number of stiff, meme-able TikTok dance strikes, then what made up the majority of her profession. It was met with nearly instant backlash, as is frequent for younger ladies with viral posts. However she wielded it like a weapon: Social media celeb begat performing roles for Rae, then a coveted collaboration with Charli XCX within the type of a “Von Dutch” remix, and now, at age 24, her last type: changing into the hyper-ambitious, hyper-femme pop star for the present second.
As a full physique of labor, “Addison” faucets into the genre-agnostic zeitgeist, the place pop music seems edgy and elastic. The songs communicate 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 home beat and its chantable, spoken refrain: “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 much less of a Sabrina Carpenter-wink and extra 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 author’s rely, is uttered 20 instances throughout the album. Throughout its 12 tracks, she is each the divine female and the lady subsequent door. Typically, they’re one in the identical.)
Rae isn’t reinventing the wheel right here, however she is rigorously pulling from her inspirations. Her story recollects Britney Spears: The pair are from Louisiana, grew to become well-known younger, and recorded their distinctive, sensual, layered pop music in Stockholm, Sweden, in and round tremendous producer Max Martin. There’s the earned Lana Del Rey parity, like within the “Born to Die”-channeling “Diet Pepsi,” echoes of Charli within the bouncy opener “New York,” and tinges of ethereal Enya manufacturing on the dreamy “Summer Forever.”
For “Addison,” Rae partnered with two main collaborators – Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd, who goes just by Elvira – an unusually small staff for a significant label pop launch. However that intimacy is likely one of the album’s superpowers, a sensibility that teeters between shut mic recordings and massive late-night anthems. Within the latter case, look no additional than “Fame Is a Gun,” a simple song-of-the-summer contender, a sunglasses-in-the-club banger with artificial vocal textures and an unignorable refrain.
Within the lead as much as the discharge of “Addison,” Rae has positioned her early TikTok fame as a method to an finish. There aren’t many avenues to Hollywood from Lafayette, Louisiana, and social media, for some, is a democratizing instrument. Rae used her dance coaching to construct a reputation for herself on the platform, one thing that has little question laid an excellent basis for pop superstardom – simply contemplate how Justin Bieber did one thing related with covers on YouTube not so a few years in the past. It feels full circle, then, that Rae’s stellar debut album goals to do what her movies on TikTok tried to do, what she’s all the time needed to do — dance, and get others to bounce, too.
