Addison Rae – ‘Addison’ review: pop’s new princess balances sensuality and experimentation with ease

Jun 9, 2025 - 10:26

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Addison Rae

Glitter. Hot pink. Dance. It’s the ultimate birthday party brief of any sensible five-year-old, and some of the guiding principles for Addison Rae’s self-titled debut album. The Louisiana singer has chainsmoked her way into becoming the new avant-garde It Girl from her TikTok dancing days, but all with a genuine girlish sincerity. It’s a dissonant yet winning combination: ‘Addison’ is pop that pairs high-brow sonic references with broader emotional strokes, mostly without feeling contrived.

“But she’s a major label psyop!!!” the sceptics bleat. If Addison Rae was an industry plant, she didn’t exactly start under fruitful conditions. Her 2021 debut single ‘Obsessed’ was received rather negatively, and many doubted whether she’d outgrow her aggressively chirpy TikTok facade. But her viral 2023 song ‘2 die 4’ proved Rae had developed some serious songwriting chops – and ‘Addison’ only confirms that she’s bloomed as a brand new superstar.

Unusually for a pop album, Rae wrote with just two people: Luka Kloser and ELVIRA. Perhaps that close-knit collaboration gave her the confidence to take bold, playful risks, like on the wide-eyed opener ‘New York’. Rae’s take on the city is both perfectly modern and off-kilter; a familiar booty-bumping Jersey beat grounds the song in the mid-2020s, but the moody synths create an eerie intimacy, like watching the lit-up skyscrapers whiz by in the privacy of a taxi. That is, until Rae hops out and immerses herself in the madness of the Big Apple, chanting “na-na-na-na” in glee.

Though Rae never strays too far away from your typical pop subjects, her writing amps up the romanticism around them. Shopping sprees become devilishly self-destructive on ‘High Fashion’ (“When it comes to shoes, I’ll be a slut”), while woozy James Blakeian synths make the entire song sound downright narcotic. Meanwhile, ‘Aquamarine’ blows ‘Obsessed’ out of the water with its cleverly alluring display of narcissism: “The world is my oyster, and I’m the only girl,” she intones.

On this record, we learn that Rae’s greatest strength is her sensuality. Her silken voice is what sells the steaminess of smash hit ‘Diet Pepsi’, and her soothing coo adds to the aching intimacy of trip-hop-inspired ‘Headphones On’: “You can’t fix what has already been broken / You just have to surrender to the moment.”

We also learn that it’s her biggest weakness. ‘Summer Forever’ is somehow even more Lana Del Rey-coded than ‘Diet Pepsi’, but unlike Lana’s ability to flip from honeyed croons to angelic warbles, Rae’s constant falsetto makes the song an overly airbrushed portrait of young love. It also kills a crucial moment on the Neptunes-inspired ‘In The Rain’: a line like “You don’t deserve my heart and guess what? I don’t owe it to you” deserves way more sass than Rae’s timid delivery. Still, if Billie Eilish can evolve from whisper-singing to belting against a raging rock breakdown, there’s absolutely promise for Rae to grow as a vocalist.

If you claimed Addison Rae would become one of the biggest poptimist successes five years ago, you probably would have been pelted with phones playing He’s All That on Netflix. But ‘Addison’ is bold, expressive, and catchy as hell, and with little overt biography, it’s completely personal in its craftsmanship. You better start planning glittery, hot-pink dance parties with ‘Addison’ blasting in the background.