FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Addison Rae

FEATURE:

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Rafael Pavarotti for W Magazine

Addison Rae

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ONE of the…

PHOTO CREDIT: Ellen Von Unwerth for ELLE

biggest and most talented Pop artists of her generation, Addison Rae, released Addison, back in June. A sensational debut, I am going to finish with a review for the album. However, before getting there., as this is Modern-Day Queens, I am dropping in some interviews. There are a few that I want to tick off. I am going to lead to an article from The Guardian, who named Addison Rae as their artist of 2025. As it is the first day of 2026, it is a perfect moment to celebrate an artist who released this masterpiece debut. One of the most complete debuts of the decade. Before her semi-eponymous debut album came out in June, Rae was perhaps best known for her work on TikTok and her acting. I am going to start with an interview from ELLE, and their interview from early last year. This TikTok sensation was in the process of becoming a Pop star:

“Rae was born in Lafayette, Louisiana, the first of three children to Sheri Nicole Easterling and Monty Lopez. Easterling worked as a makeup artist and Lopez in real estate. Rae’s parents divorced not long after she was born and later reunited, marrying in 2017 and then divorcing again in 2022. Rae lived with her mom growing up, moving between towns and cities in Louisiana, and also for a spell in Houston, Texas. She attended private religious schools and began taking dance classes at the age of six, setting the stage for her passion early on. “My family sacrificed a lot to get me in dance classes and to put me in a nice school,” Rae says. “It was never easy, and I thank my parents a lot for that.”

She says she got her sense of Southern hospitality from her mom. Rae might be famous now, but she’ll still greet strangers on her walk to the nearest coffee shop and strike up a conversation with the barista once she gets there. “I value a sense of community where I am, so being a regular makes me happy,” Rae says. She’s had to learn some boundaries, though: “It actually might be dangerous to let somebody in your car for a ride,” she says with a laugh.

Like many Southern belles before her, in 2019, after high school, Rae enrolled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she planned to join the dance team, hoping to catch her big break on the sidelines of a Tigers game. But when she didn’t make the team, which would have paid her a stipend, her parents told her it was going to be tough to make the college economics work, even though they’d moved to be closer to campus so Rae could live at home.

She began pursuing a major in broadcast journalism, but found herself “struggling really hard, because it’s fucking miserable to write papers about shit you don’t care about,” she says. “I was like, ‘Wow, what am I going to do?’ I really just wanted to perform. I wanted to honor the passion and desire to entertain that was inside of me, but I also didn’t want to struggle, and make my family struggle, as a result of that dream.”

She begged her parents to let her move to Los Angeles. To keep expenses low, she moved in with the family of a friend she had met online. “I was so thankful for them,” Rae says, “because I don’t know how I would have ever made that work otherwise.” Before long, she had signed with the behemoth talent agency William Morris Endeavor and began pursuing every job opportunity she could get her hands on. “I was doing any sponsored video I could do to make money to try and make this work for myself,” Rae says. “That’s why I was posting so much. I was like, ‘There’s only one chance.’ It was a big bet to make, and I knew I would hate myself if I didn’t try as hard as I could to make this happen.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Ellen Von Unwerth

After signing with WME, she asked her parents to move to L.A., too, telling them she didn’t know how she was going to live this life alone. So they found a way to get themselves to the West Coast city, even joining TikTok, dancing alongside their daughter. At times, her parents’ tit-for-tat relationship conflicts have blown up fantastically on TikTok; Rae says she now refrains from checking her parents’ social media. “My family has taken a step back and become much more private,” she notes. “Family is always tricky, but at the end of the day, you love them and you take the good and try to leave the bad in the past. Nobody’s perfect.”

As Rae’s following swelled, she continued documenting her life gratuitously for the cameras, signing off each video with her dazzling, beauty queen smile. “It was an intense period of my life—there was a lot of work that went into us living there—but I also had so much fun while I was doing it all,” she says. “I wasn’t going to let being cringe and posting a million videos stop me. And now that I look back at it, I don’t feel embarrassed about anything I ever posted. I can appreciate that girl and say that was a girl who was going to make it happen, no matter what that meant doing.”

“And I wasn’t doing anything harmful,” she adds. “I was just having a dandy time dancing.”

Making the transition from social media to pop stardom was always going to be an uphill battle. In March of 2021, she released the squeaky-clean track “Obsessed”—“I’m obsessed with me-e-e as much as you”—which was widely panned by critics. It was a blow to her nascent music career, and she considered giving up on the idea altogether. But eventually, she went back into the studio to work on more songs, which were unceremoniously leaked online the following year. She has said she has no idea how the songs got out, and was crushed, but then something amazing happened: The tracks became sleeper hits online. Charli XCX even contacted her to feature on the song “2 Die 4”.

I will move on soon. However, in a Variety feature from last May, they reveal how Addison Rae’s debut album was produced by women. In a music industry where there is still a huge imbalance regarding the gender of producers in studios, it is a huge positive step that such an important artist’s debut album is produced by women. Let’s hope that this year sees that happen more:

“In a candid interview for Variety’s Behind the Song, Rae details the making of her second Hot 100-charting single “Headphones On,” and her upcoming self-titled debut album, produced entirely by a trio of women — herself, Luka Kloser, and Elvira — a rare feat in an industry still dominated by male producers.

What began as a casual collaboration during a session in Stockholm (Rae was literally sick at the time, joking that she “sounds like she’s holding her nose” on the song “Headphones On”) quickly turned into something deeper: a creative bond rooted in mutual trust, vulnerability and femininity.

“I have something really special with these girls,” she says of the team behind her album. “It feels really beautiful and magical that it is just all females. I never set out for it to be that way, I think because it’s not very common and you almost don’t get that opportunity very much to work with just females in a room.”

Though many are curious about Rae’s musical influences, she insists she pulled few for the making of “Addison,” explaining that her process was driven by emotion. “We definitely didn’t reference anything making this album. It was always me trying to provoke a feeling from a song or from music,” she said. Much of the inspiration came from her dance career and her own self-expression: “I’m a very sensual and sexual person. I’m very intimate with myself and my body, and everything kind of reflects that. Everything feels very personal”.

The next interview I want to come to is from W Magazine. They spoke with Addison Rae: a Pop artist very much tailor-made for today. Somebody who does not hanker for the viral side of social media and the emptiness of that, Rae is and has “digital savvy, unbridled charisma, and plenty of talent, the TikTok sensation is creating a new blueprint for pop stardom”. I think that we might even get a new album from the Louisiana-born artist this year. Or some new singles:

“While making Addison, which debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 in June, Rae was far more deliberate. “I’m a very visual person, so everything was mapped out: colors, themes, how I wanted to translate them into a project. I made a binder. I printed out photos and colors and words. Before the album had any sonic world, before there was any audio involved, it was just purely visions, visuals, words,” she explained.

She worked exclusively with Swedish producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser, both in their 20s, to create a sophisticated blend of shimmering electronic sounds. “We were three girls in a room,” said Rae. “It was a very fun and free-flowing environment. There was no pressure to force ourselves to make an album or a certain number of songs. It just happened gradually over time.” Rae says that with only women in the studio, the recording sessions had a different energy. “We had this really magic moment making ‘Diet Pepsi’ on the first day we met, which is really crazy and almost seems so unrealistic,” she added. Yet it mirrored how things tend to happen in her life: simultaneously making “so much sense and also no sense at all.”

Released in August 2024 as the lead single from her 2025 debut, “Diet Pepsi” earned Rae her first major breakthrough. The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica ranked the breathy track No. 4 on his year-end list, calling it “the most saccharine whisper of the year.” Rae’s reverb-heavy vocals and dense soundscapes drew comparisons to Lana Del Rey’s 2012 Born to Die and Madonna’s late-’90s pop reset. “Diet Pepsi” nods to “Diet Mountain Dew,” and in “Aquamarine” Rae sings, “I’m the ray of light.” In “Money Is Everything,” Rae makes her artistic lineage explicit: “Please DJ, play Madonna / Wanna roll one with Lana.”

Like Madonna and Del Rey before her, Rae is consciously embodying the pop moment; only in her case, that means making the most of an era defined by likes, shares, and views. Her genius lies in turning TikTok trends, influencer clout, and algorithmic intuition into deliberate creative tools. A lifetime of switching between her private and public selves has sharpened Rae’s talent for improvisation and intimacy; she’s genuine enough to seem unpredictable and canny enough to know exactly how she should appear across our screens. Hers is a new kind of artistic blueprint: Get famous first through the feed; prove you’ve got creative chops once you’ve established an audience. That’s why her Addison transformation feels believable—she’s not replacing the content creator with the inner artist, but revealing how both sides work together. With a wink, a nod, and sometimes a shriek, Rae is signaling that she’s in it for the long run, showing the world she’s more than capable of referencing the legacy of pop icons while forging something entirely of her own”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Rafael Pavarotti for W Magazine

Before getting to The Guardian then a review of Addison, there is one more interview to come to. The Los Angeles Times chatted with Addison Rae in December. Having released her debut earlier in the year, there was a lot to reflect on. She can now truly look back at 2025 and everything she has achieved. I do think that this year will be the biggest one yet. One where she also gets some huge acting roles. I would love to see huge Pop artists like Addison Rae, Taylor Swift and Charli xcx to team up for a film:

“A lot of the reaction to your album — the energy has basically been: Hold up, this is pretty good.

I’ll take a win where I get it [laughs]. I’ve actually gotten really comfortable in this space of everyone thinking that everything I do will be mediocre and me doing something better than that and them being surprised. I do think that will change, though.

What do you think is behind the low expectations? Certainly, part of it is because you’re a woman and that’s the world we live in.

Boring.

You clearly made the right album. Have you thought about what the wrong album would’ve been?

The label definitely wasn’t keen on “Diet Pepsi” being the first song. They were like, “We don’t think this is what people are expecting from you.”

Did you have a sense of what they thought people were expecting?

I think there was an idea of what my music should sound like.

Which was?

Bad? Bad or soulless or maybe just a little more shallow, I guess. And by the way, I love shallow music. When I put out my first single, “Obsessed” [in 2021], it was very much based on what I thought I wanted to be as an artist. And over time that changed. Thank God for the critics — without them, I maybe would’ve kept doing music like “Obsessed” and not pushed myself to try things that people didn’t expect.

We seem to be living in an age of pop-girl rivalries. Do you agree, and if so does that bum you out?

It doesn’t have to be a thing, but I get it — it’s entertaining. Historically, there’s always been this friendly or maybe unfriendly competition between people. I think it’s a very natural human thing to want to exceed a standard that someone else has laid out. I’m not really interested it for myself. I think it takes away from the reason I want to do any of this stuff.

Can you avoid it? Take Taylor Swift versus your friend Charli XCX as an example. I wonder whether you feel like you have to take a side.

I guess we’ll have to see. But there’s so much more to all these things. There are people that do weird things, and I try to avoid those people.

When you moved to L.A., you wanted to sing, dance and act. Has your success in music reshaped your ambitions for acting?

I feel like it’s all one and the same to me — I just want to perform, and wherever that finds its home is where I’m putting my energy. I wouldn’t say that every night on tour before I went onstage I was necessarily in the best mood of my life. Some nights, you’re crying before you go on, so you’re kind of acting in a way to put on this performance for people. I’m very ambitious in general. I love chasing big dreams, and if that comes in the form of an amazing script or a director that I really love and trust, I’m 10 toes deep”.

I am ending with a positive review for one of the best albums of last year. The Guardian named Addison Rae as their artist of the year. They interviewed Rae about her shift from TikTok star to bona fide Pop icon of today. How she is both regaining and relinquishing control – and is looking to share less this year. I think that Addison Rae is a fascinating artist who is among the most gifted voices and songwriters of the modern era:

“I read her something that the Washington Post wrote when they named Addison album of the year: “Why does this woman sound so alone?” “That is so interesting, I actually want to see that,” she says, typing in the newspaper’s URL before being surprised to hit the paywall: “I thought I was totally paying for that!” She gets why listeners would interpret it that way. “The album was [from] a very lonely perspective. I wanted to say it on my own and to communicate in a way that felt like I was speaking for myself. Life is lonely, and there’s something really powerful about taking that into your own hands.” That’s one of the most captivating aspects of the record, I suggest: the steeliness of her self-reliant perspective versus the enveloping softness of its sound. “That means a lot,” she says. “I am an introspective person and I love to look inside and understand why I feel the way I do. I think that is being alone in a very beautiful way, in a way that honours the stories I want to tell and the way I want to tell them.”

It’s immediately clear when you get Addison on something she’s less keen to share. She’s fairly guarded when I ask about whether being a sexual person, as she recently described herself, was challenging when she attended religious schools in Louisiana, or if she had to unlearn anything she was taught there. “I was never someone who was necessarily a rule follower,” she says. “If anything, staying in line was more of a way to avoid conflict.” She talks at slightly filibustering length about always wanting to understand why different people had different beliefs, and credits moving to California with showing her “so many ways of experiencing life that I was not questioning or I was so unaware of when I was living back home”.

It’s both surprising and understandable to hear how much Rae obsesses over control. Her appeal comes from her unaffected, sweetly giddy persona: during her Variety awards speech, she appeared genuinely breathless with excitement. She is also one of several pop stars who has put the fun back in fame after several years of musicians stressing how painful it is, the newly minted insider making a gasp-face at the thrill of it all on the red carpet. She treats celebrity as part of her craft and is open about craving it: “Have you ever dreamt of being seen? / Not by someone, more like in a magazine,” she sings on High Fashion (winningly, also the song she has listened to the most this year). “I enjoy fame,” she says plainly. “I think fame is very exposing and raw, and it puts you in a position that not everyone gets to experience. I enjoy the luxury of it all, though of course there is a price you pay.”

Rae’s new year’s resolution, she says, “is to share less. I’ve actually been thinking about this so much. No one needs to know anything!” She laughs. “Obviously I love to talk and to share, and I’ve done a great deal of that on this call already, but I think the less you share, the more in control you are.” As for the rest of 2026, although she just got back from writing in Sweden, there’s no immediate plan to follow up Addison. “When something’s ready and done, I want to put it out as soon as possible,” she says”.

I will finish off with a review of the astonishing Addison from Pitchfork. They herald the “girlypop album of summer” that warrants comparisons to Lana Del Rey, Madonna and Britney Spears. Pitchfork ask if we are truly ready for Addison Rae. One of these artists that you know we’ll be discussing for so many years to come. Addison is without doubt one of the best albums of last year. The more I listen to it, the more I get and discover:

“Rae’s debut album, Addison, floats in on a swell of goodwill following a string of improbably great singles, each one a little weirder than the last. Last August’s effervescent “Diet Pepsi” felt a bit like early Lana in the star-spangled coquetry of its parking lot romance. But where Del Rey sang her torch songs with cool resignation, Rae’s layered vocals seemed to buzz with woozy warmth, punctuated here and there with “Ahh!”s of satisfaction. Its followup, “Aquamarine,” has grown on me since fall—a four-on-the-floor siren song which eagerly begged comparison to Madonna’s Ray of Light or Kylie Minogue’s Fever. The moody minor chords of February’s “High Fashion” were less primed for the charts than for a cuddle puddle at an after-hours flophouse. And there was poignance in the downcast trip-hop of fourth single “Headphones On,” which faced the doldrums with a cigarette and a stiff upper lip. In the video, Rae pops in a pair of wired earbuds and is whisked off from her day job to a manic pixie dream world.

After years of deferring to the professionals in sessions, Rae met Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser in early 2024—a pair of young songwriter/producers signed to MXM Studios, the publishing camp of pop mastermind Max Martin. After writing the hook of “Diet Pepsi” together that same day, the three women would go on to write almost all of Addison themselves, while Kloser and Anderfjärd are the album’s sole producers. What ties its tracks together is less a genre than a feeling—sensual and heady, propelled by private intensity, occasionally euphoric and other times lost in itself. It’s music you can move to, though not exactly “club,” often built atop the stacked chords of the Korg M1 keyboard, whose organ presets epitomized the sound of ’90s house. The mood is often wistful in spite of the ripe imagery—sun-kissed skin, foggy windows, drunk cigarettes and so forth—as if life moved too quickly to relish in real time.

If Addison has a narrative throughline, it’s one you’ve heard before, in which a plucky ingénue strikes out for fame and fortune in the wacky world of showbiz. But Rae is at her most delightful balancing camp and sincerity on starry-eyed numbers in which all the world’s a stage. “You’ve got a front row seat, and I/I’ve got a taste of the glamorous life,” she trills on “Fame is a gun” with just a whiff of desperation, a callback to another Britney adage. (“There’s only two types of people in the world,” Spears sang knowingly on “Circus.” “The ones that entertain and the ones that observe.”) She opens “Money is Everything” with a faux-naive stage whisper: “When I was growing up, Momma always told me to save my money so I never had to rely on a man to take care of me,” purrs the girl who claimed that she dropped her Southern accent because “Marilyn Monroe never said ‘y’all.’” “But money’s not coming with me to heaven—and I have a lot of it!” Rae presses on. “So can’t a girl just have fun?” Cue the beat drop and the chorus, a slightly psycho girl choir whose “Lemonade”-esque harmonies sound like they’re being shouted from the sunroof of a speeding car.

Later in that song, Rae traipses to the DJ booth to request Madonna, then rattles off some shoutouts in a cartoonish yelp: “I wanna roll one with Lana/Get high with Gaga/And the girl I used to be is still the girl inside of me!” She’s made a point of wearing her inspirations on her sleeve, though Gaga’s influence was stronger on her 2023 EP, AR. As for Lana, there are moments (mostly “Summer Forever”) when the Born to Die worship approaches Kirkland Signature territory, with lyrics torn from the inscription pages of a high school yearbook. Rae’s disposition is generally sunnier than Del Rey’s, minus the abjection that invariably shadows romance. But where their mindsets meet is a solemn belief that you ought to live your life as if it were a work of art.

In Rae’s first cover story earlier this year, there’s a quote from Charli xcx—her mentor-slash-bestie whose “Von Dutch” remix marked the first time that Rae came off as cool—that’s been rattling around my head. “Everything she does relates back to her art,” said Charli of her friend’s evolution. “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.” Initially, I found the idea depressing: a teenage girl who’d changed her life performing to a phone camera, now optimizing her every move for the aesthetic. Then again, there’s something potent in Rae’s winking performance—a borderline unhinged devotion to the American promise that a person’s destiny is entirely in their hands. Why not trade small-town boredom for gonzo Hollywood glam? Why not conspire against reality in favor of romance? Towards the end of the Frou Frou-esque “Times Like These,” Rae hears her own song on the radio and wonders aloud: “Let’s see how far I go”.

After a magnificent and hugely successful year – including a GRAMMY nomination -, you do wonder what this year holds in store. Addison is a staggering album that I absolutely love. I am so interested to see where Addison Rae…