Introduced to the world as a bubbly TikTok influencer, the singer/dancer/actor spent 2024 pulling off what looked like a total reinvention—screaming over the remix of mentor Charli xcx’s “Von dutch” remix, then releasing the steamy “Diet Pepsi,” a single charming enough to seduce even the doubters. In fact, Addison Rae was just reintroducing herself. “I always knew that I wanted to make music, I knew I wanted to perform,” Rae tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “That was something that was really obvious to me since I was a little girl.” And TikTok was the best way for a teenager from Lafayette, Louisiana, to catapult herself into the seemingly inaccessible world of showbiz.
Pursuing her pop-star dreams in LA studio sessions to write the songs that would become her first EP (2023’s polarizing <i>AR</i>), Rae found herself deferring to the professionals. “When I moved here and started doing sessions, I was like, ‘I need as much guidance as possible,’” she says. “Then, over time, I really started to lean on myself. I really started to lean on my abilities.” In February 2024, Rae met songwriter/producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser (both part of the publishing camp of Swedish pop powerhouse Max Martin) and wrote the effervescent hook of “Diet Pepsi” that same day. “[‘Diet Pepsi’] was such a natural beginning to all of this,” says Rae. “I think it was a perfect introduction in so many ways.”
Cue a string of curveball singles, each one presenting an unexpected new facet, from the moody, minor-key “High Fashion” to the Björk-inspired “Headphones On.” It feels apt, then, that her debut album drops the “Rae” and simply goes by <i>Addison</i>—a collection of dreamy, intense pop songs that sound like self-discovery, tied together less by genre than by mood. Tracks like “Fame Is a Gun” and “Money Is Everything” expertly straddle camp and sincerity: “You’ve got a front-row seat, and I/I got a taste of the glamorous life!” she winks on the former, a dizzy synth-pop number on the perils of hitting the big time.
The songs on <i>Addison</i> are not exactly club bangers, though they’re informed by Rae’s childhood as a dancer; nor are any of them obvious hits. But Rae relished the opportunity to let her creative instincts run wild. “Once you start playing it safe, feeling like, ‘Okay, I’m going to respond with what people want,’ you lose all your freedom,” she says. “You lose all desire for the whole purpose of starting it, and feeling like it’s a form of expression and a reflection. It’s more scary to let that go and give people exactly what they think they want.”
As for what Rae learned in the process of writing the album? “Let yourself play. Let yourself have fun, let yourself mess up,” she says. “I’m not saying, ‘All right, this is the real me now.’ No—it’s always been the real me, and those experiences have completely guided and shaped me to where I am now. It is about arrival—arrival to who I feel like I’ve become, and who has experienced all these ups and downs, to now land here, in this person that I am now.”
