Addison Rae Has Impeccable Taste

If you expected Addison Rae’s long-awaited debut album, Addison, to elicit TikTok callbacks and wisecracks, you’re likely not yet hip to the 24-year-old’s impeccable palate. With the help of Swedish pop prodigies and editorial aesthetic choices, the singer has imbued every molecule of her project with taste: smoking cigs indiscriminately, dancing in sifted powder, and playing a glamorous celeb in front of a syringe centerpiece.

There are no viral-chasing hooks attuned for bedroom dancing, but rather meticulously mapped-out visuals and bops that require even the most astute critics and fans to do their pop-culture homework. It begs the question: Was this genre-loving artist within Rae the whole time? On Addison, she assures us, “The girl I used to be is still the girl inside of me.”

As Rae told The New York Times, “I’ve recognized how much choice and taste is kind of a luxury.” In that sense, Addison feels like a decidedly modern spin on a nostalgic POV, starting with its liner notes. An all-female production team, primarily led by Elvira and Luka Kloser, creates a cohesive universe that’s unafraid to evoke “Ray of Light” and Norma Jeane, then seal it with it a kiss — or “cigarette pressed between my t*ts,” as Rae sings on “High Fashion.” The nods are traceable, but their synergy rings unexpectedly. Even the golden, Y2Chaotic album art feels carefully curated for an audience who grew up worshipping at the altar of magazine covers, amplifying Picsart filters, and managing Lana Del Rey-aesthetic Tumblr pages.

On the opening track, “New York,” you can feel the Charli XCX cosign as she twists a sparse, Bowery Hotel-mentioning meditation on city life into a banger made to measure for Bushwick dance floors. Then, the lush and lyrical “Diet Pepsi” rolls in with some Americana sensualism before she shifts the story back to It girls on “Money Is Everything.”

Throughout its 33-minute runtime, cerebral interludes stitch together a sprawling collection of Valencia-filtered tracks and sonic swings, never repetitive in tempo or tune, and each serving as a testament to her pop-star potential. Even its slower moments, like the twinkling keys of “In the Rain” and meditative “Times Like These,” refuse to slump down to ballad level. Gaga encouraged us to “just dance,” Britney told us to “keep on dancing until the world ends,” but Addison’s track list somehow glorifies the act of escaping into those songs (with your headphones on) into a full narrative of its own.

Perhaps the transformation from Addison Rae to “Addison” wasn’t overnight, but it bubbled underneath the surface. Though gay Twitter and music aficionados sensed her pop-saving potential after her 2021 debut single “Obsessed,” it was largely written off by critics unwilling to see Rae’s foray as anything but an inauthentic cash grab. That the Louisiana native, who boasts 88 million TikTok followers, now has music elites questioning how she assembled such a slick rollout is both a testament to her artistry (and, it must be said, the luxury of having the time and resources to craft such a record).

Famously, Rae mapped out her vision for Addison with words like “intentional,” “intense,” “heart,” and “dance.” At face value, the presentation may sound half-baked. Still, thanks to a tour de force of fashion and beauty collaborators, including visually stuffed videos like “Fame is a Gun” and “Headphones On", you can’t deny the record’s ability to mirror those words in a slyly sophisticated way.

Her output feels like a curation of our most beloved pop-culture oddities: sneaky beats, Björk’s Icelandic greenery, surrealism, Euphoria glitter eyes, and an impressive knowledge of Madonna’s back catalogue. But while we may know Rae’s reference points — she name-drops a handful — she refuses to be nailed down by them.

According to the singer’s website, this is Addison Rae's first and last album. (Fans speculate she will henceforth be known as just “Addison.”) The mononym is a big move, reminiscent of the pop icons whose art and celebrity she’s carefully studied. But by borrowing, learning, and filtering it into her own, she inhabits the very core of artistry.