Addison Rae is making the pivot from influencer to pop star look easy

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In a world that requires celebrities to broaden themselves into multi-hyphenates, let’s stop acting perplexed when a media personality takes up a new line of work. Especially if it’s in the tower of song. Why are fame’s transitive properties so fluid in pop music? Maybe because the fundamental nature of the gig involves transposing life experience into sound.

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We’re probably more familiar with this than we’d like to be. As an early reality star, Paris Hilton embarked on pioneering adventures through the attention economy that surely taught her something about a head-turning pop hook. Being named NBA Rookie of the Year likely gave Shaquille O’Neal that extra smidgen of confidence necessary for making straight-faced rap records. And obviously, the platinum career arcs of Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Miley Cyrus and many others have proven that the Disney Channel is something like pop’s MIT.

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So instead of being surprised by the fact that TikTok influencer Addison Rae just released one of this year’s very best pop albums, let’s try to tune our ears to all the things she learned while plowing the fields of digital content creation. The 24-year-old Louisiana native got her start dancing to songs that were trending on social media, then quickly branched out into everything else. A little podcasting here. A little Netflix acting there. With her follower count on TikTok currently standing at 88.4 million, she remains finely tuned to what audiences are drawn to, what they return to, how to perpetually delight them without boring them, how to surprise them without scaring them off.

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Her fantastic debut album, “Addison,” was co-written with Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser, two Swedish song factory supervisors who know how to push synthesizer patches and bass melodies in all kinds of unexpected directions. As for Rae, she’s clearly a student of Lana Del Rey’s dead-eyed sotto voce (“Diet Pepsi”), Madonna’s regal pomp (“Aquamarine”), Ariana Grande’s aspartame coo (“Summer Forever”), with her overall aesthetic falling square in the nuclear green shadow of Charli XCX – and if this is the first great post-“Brat” album, may a hundred summers bloom.

Timbre-wise, though, Rae’s closest contemporary parallel is Billie Eilish, an intimacy-minded singer who understands our ears as well as she understands her own voice. There’s a breathy, ASMR-like softness tucked into most of Rae’s songs – as well as some louder fourth-wall breakage during the finale of “Money Is Everything” when a fleet of Addisons materializes to shout along with the refrain, prompting us to do the same. On the album opener, “New York,” the big cue to heed Rae’s loudness-softness is lyrical, describing the thump of a nightclub subwoofer and a masticated rhythm that only exists inside your head: “Kick drum, chew gum.”

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Even better is “Fame Is a Gun,” a dreams-come-true anthem that spins Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?” and Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” into a new kind of cotton candy. “There’s no mystery. I’m gonna make it, gonna go down in history,” Rae sings in the exquisite second verse. “Don’t ask too many questions. God gave me the permission,” her voice suddenly shooting upward in the middle of the word “permission” as if she were nudging heaven. Is it a perfect pop song? There’s no such thing. We’re reminded of that whenever someone gets this close.

And so it seems that the best way for an influencer to truly supplant a pop singer in this overstimulated digital world is to literally become one. It’s hard to imagine the thrill of amassing nearly 90 million TikTok followers – or becoming a television star, or winning an NBA scoring title – coming anywhere close to having made something as wonderful as music like this.

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