“I’d rather feel the sun kiss on my skin / With a cigarette pressed between my tits,” claims Addison Rae on her single “High Fashion.” A couple questions: First of all, is the cigarette lit? If so, ouch! Second of all—wait, what? How does that even work? Is the butt pointed out and someone is smoking it, and therefore blowing the smoke toward her? I’m not sure I would call that sun-kissed, exactly. Is it her cigarette, or is she just holding on to it for safekeeping? Is it getting soggy with sweat? Maybe it’s best not to think too deeply about what exactly it means to press a cigarette between one’s tits, because the answer probably is that it means nothing at all—it just feels like something. On her debut album, Addison, out last Friday, that seems to be Rae’s MO: evoking Y2K, sex, partying, and romance, even when it doesn’t totally make sense.
Perhaps that’s just par for the course for a TikToker turned aspiring pop star. Rae first gained notoriety through the app in 2019, and she’s currently the fifth most–followed individual on the platform, with 88 million followers. She blew up thanks to the dance trend videos that everyone was glued to in the early days of the pandemic—she even performed them on a Tonight Show segment that already feels like a relic of a bygone era. But really, it was sheer willpower that got her there: “I attribute all my social media growth across all platforms to one thing: consistency,” she told Forbes in 2020, already sounding like a marketing exec at age 19. “I am always really active. Daily, I post three to five pieces of content on each platform. People notice how often I post, how much I interact with them, and people really like that.”
Music was, of course, central to those videos. It just wasn’t Rae’s music. As one can guess, she was often lip-syncing. Rae said recently on The New York Times’ Popcast that in her early TikTok days, she accepted payments from record labels via PayPal to use songs in her videos—she cited Lykke Li’s “Sex Money Feelings Die” as a specific example. Sounds like an arduous process ripe to be slashed with a red pen! But as TikTok virality became more and more essential to producing a mainstream hit, it’s not hard to imagine a shadowy suit coming along and realizing you can just cut out the middleman—avoid those payments between influencers and pop stars by simply making the influencer a pop star.
Generational Influence
If that sounds like a recipe for some cynical and hollow music making, you’re not wrong. But the thing is, Rae’s songs aren’t awful. They’re even pretty good! Her whole aesthetic is completely curated and A&R’d to death—right down to the oversaturated Ray of Light homage cover that’s begging for a pixelated version on LimeWire—and that factory-made quality is certainly apparent in her sound. But the sound itself isn’t bad, and there was clearly a lot of thought put into it that you probably wouldn’t expect from a lip-syncing TikToker’s musical endeavor.
After Rae’s debut single, “Obsessed”—a fairly standard empowerment-core dance-pop song—was released in 2021 to critical revulsion, she knew there had to be some real intention behind her music if she wanted to be taken seriously. “I felt definitely a little beaten down,” she said on Popcast, reflecting on the reaction to the song. “I was like, ‘Oh wait, I can’t just have fun and explore. People are not gonna allow that.’” Her music career took a back seat to acting when she booked roles in Netflix’s gender-swapped She’s All That remake (long live Jessica Miles Torres) and Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving—though she was still writing songs behind the scenes, with Lady Gaga, Janet Jackson, and especially Britney Spears serving as her primary influences.
Essential to the relaunch of Rae’s music career was that coveted Charli XCX cosign that every aspiring unconventional pop artist craves. After a number of Rae’s demos leaked online—and this time, the music was received warmly—Charli hopped on the leaked “2 Die 4” for its official release in 2022, and Rae in turn grabbed a verse for the remix of Charli’s single “Von Dutch” in 2024. That the latter collaboration happened just as Brat fever was taking off made Rae’s maybe-she’s-onto-something stock skyrocket. Soon she was hanging out with Rosalía, Troye Sivan, and Arca, and it seemed like the entire alt-pop world was coalescing around her. It’s easy to cry “industry plant” upon seeing all of this, especially because this all clearly wasn’t an accident: “Everything she does relates back to her art,” Charli said of Rae in Rolling Stone earlier this year. “Every item of clothing she wears, everything she says in a red-carpet interview, everything she tweets—it all is a part of the world-building.” After “Obsessed” was shunned, it was certainly a calculated decision for Rae to ingratiate herself with critically respected, alternative-leaning pop artists. Does that mean that decision was disingenuous? Rae claims this pivot was sincere: “I wasn’t even trying to do that. I was just into these things,” she told Popcast when asked whether she was aligning herself with Charli and Co. to shore up her cool-kid credentials. “I totally understand why you might think that, because I wasn’t sharing these parts of myself online.”
Another factor here is that major labels weren’t all that interested in Rae from the get-go. There was a time in the late 2010s when Atlantic Records was signing every viral personality under the sun to a deal, but that time had seemingly passed. She released “Obsessed” and her EP AR through the independent label Sandlot and still didn’t get any nabs from major labels until Columbia signed her in 2024, which likely gave her the resources to complete her musical reinvention.
Enter “Diet Pepsi,” Rae’s 2024 single and her first since “Obsessed.” It’s a dreamy, sensual, and (maybe most importantly) vibey tune that pretty blatantly cribs from early Lana Del Rey aesthetics but does a damn good job of doing so. “My boy’s a winner, he loves the game / My lips reflect off his cross gold chain,” Rae sings in a nasally whisper that really evokes Britney. Like many of her songs, “Diet Pepsi” reads like a Tumblr collage—she paints a picture in broad strokes but keeps an eye for the details that create the feeling, if not the cohesive portrait. By nailing that feeling on Addison’s lead single, along with a downright heavenly sonic palette, Rae established that her music career wasn’t just a fluke—and critics sang her praises, featuring the track on many best-of-the-year lists.
Best of 2024
“Diet Pepsi” set the template for the rest of Addison, which was produced by European pop journeymen Elvira Anderfjard (Taylor Swift, Tove Lo) and Luka Kloser (Ariana Grande), who are both signed to Max Martin’s publishing company, MxM Music. The result is a hypnotic, near-dream-pop record that leans hard on main pop-girl iconography and soft on introspection. “Money’s not coming with me to heaven, and I have a lot of it,” she opens on the aptly titled “Money Is Everything.” “So can’t a girl just have fun?” Later, she croons on the wistful “Summer Forever,” “We’re naked at the beach / Barefoot on the street / Background on my phone / Never felt less alone,” as her voice echoes and sharpens into the chorus. That’s not to say there aren’t any glimpses into Rae’s interiority on the record—on “Times Like These,” she all too relatably wonders, “Am I too young to be this mad? / Am I too old to blame my dad?”—but they’re all secondary to the album’s commitment to aesthetic building, chasing a universal feeling rather than expressing her own. The sound of Addison is meticulous, if repetitive, in offering up lush, ethereal instrumentals to soundtrack her moody landscapes.
Depending on your definition of success, and with the caveat that being cool and being popular do not often overlap (though I would posit Rae is trying for both), the TikToker turned pop artist who’s technically reaching a wider audience than Rae right now is Alex Warren. Warren is an alum of the Hype House, a content house he cofounded and lived in alongside influencers like Charli D’Amelio; Huddy; Warren’s now-wife Kouvr Annon; and, yes, Addison Rae. Maybe you don’t know what any of that means, or maybe you thought the Hype House, too, was already a distant memory from another time, but facts are facts—Warren currently has the no. 1 song in America, with his single “Ordinary” topping the Billboard Hot 100 this week.
Like Rae, Warren did not initially gain a following on TikTok for being particularly musically inclined. He started out posting skateboarding content to YouTube in the mid-2010s, before pivoting to prank and stunt videos where he pushed his brother on an air mattress into the middle of a lake and let Logan Paul drive over him in his Hummer. (Netflix’s Hype House series chronicled his efforts to stage a fake wedding to Kouvr.) His shift to music came in 2021, when he started releasing worship-inspired ballads and stomp-clap-hey acoustic ditties, citing Ed Sheeran and Lewis Capaldi as influences. “I wanted to be a singer since I was a kid and my dad bought me my first guitar,” Warren recently told Variety of his musical aspirations. “I kept writing, keeping things to myself until one day I decided to post a video online of me singing and it went viral.” After releasing music sporadically through the 2020s, “Ordinary”—an emotional, Christian-tinged ode to his wife—is his first single to take off.
With “Ordinary,” Warren is, on paper, going for “authenticity” (whatever that means) in a way that Rae isn’t by aiming for lyrical-minded music about his personal life. That doesn’t mean his image isn’t also intentionally curated—his hit song is advertised as being about his very public relationship that was documented via years of social media and a Netflix show, and he got to perform it live for the first time on a Love Is Blind reunion episode before the song even got popular. Still, his approach has obviously connected with people and resulted in chart success, even though “Diet Pepsi,” which topped out at no. 54 on the Hot 100, is an infinitely better song than “Ordinary.” It makes sense—take a look through the Hot 100 right now, and you’ll see it’s littered with names like Benson Boone, Teddy Swims, and Morgan Wallen, all of whom are closely aligned with Warren’s sound. Last year’s Brat, which is probably the closest recent analog for what Rae is striving for on Addison, didn’t have a single that cracked the top 10. I can appreciate that Rae exhibits some taste in what she’s building her music around and that she’s willing to pursue something that might even be a little niche, even if it will never have that organic quality of Brat Summer.
All of this points toward a question: Do we have to take any of this seriously? Feel free to teleport back to 2009 poptimism discourse to debate it further, but from the Monkees to Bhad Bhabie, the idea of manufacturing a pop act out of a pop culture phenomenon is nothing new. Though considering TikTok’s relationship to music—and its control over what music gets to be popular—there is something that feels particularly craven and artless about the influencer-to-pop-star pipeline. But, while I can’t say much for Alex Warren, like the Monkees and Bhad Bhabie before her, Addison Rae has some bangers. Sure, they were designed in a lab to be bangers, but there’s a sound there that’s compelling enough for Pitchfork to give her the coveted “8.0, no Best New Music” that’s usually reserved for critically adored Midwest emo. That said, the monoculture is dead, and if anything, Warren is closer to reviving it than Rae. But in a time when it’s never been easier to keep scrolling, it is interesting that Rae is striving for something, well, interesting. Whether or not that moves you—and whether or not we’re in for an Addison Summer—I’d venture to guess that the influencer-to-pop-star pipeline is here to stay, and if “Ordinary” is any indication, it could be a lot worse than Addison.
