If you view a certain kind of current pop as involving a checklist of prerequisites, then the career of 20-year-old Canadian Tate McRae ticks virtually every box. A prehistory in kids’ television? Check, albeit as the voice of Spot Splatter Splash in the cartoon Lalaloopsy. Online celebrity translated into IRL musical success, aided by a co-sign from an established artist? Check: her transition from a YouTube vlogger was aided by Billie Eilish, who co-wrote, with Finneas O’Connell, McRae’s debut single Tear Myself Apart. Lyrics that deal in bad boyfriends, I-didn’t-ASK-to-be-born angst and loud declarations about not minding being recently dumped because he’ll come crawling back soon enough? Check: her oeuvre is heavy on tracks with titles such as Feel Like Shit, Hate Myself, Hurt My Feelings, We’re Not Alike, Exes and Go Away. Music that’s a three-way split between pop-trap, big ballads and guitars that go chugga-chugga in time-honoured pop-punk style alongside vocals larded with AutoTune or delivered in that accusatory mush-mouthed slur that somehow suggests the singer is performing with their bottom lip stuck out like a petulant four-year-old? Check.
And virality, absolutely – her recent single Greedy has not only frequently been the most listened-to track in the world on Spotify, it has soundtracked nearly 4m videos on TikTok, many of them featuring something called the “tube girl hair flip transition trend”, that it’s perhaps best not to explain in depth lest you take it as further evidence that culture as we know it is doomed.
It’s hard not to listen to McRae and think that there is an awful lot of this stuff about. Yet it’s clearly a formula with commercial life. Last week, as the UK charts were swamped by Christmas songs, Greedy – the latest in a string of gold and platinum hits for her on both sides of the Atlantic – remained one of the last redoubtable holdouts, a small corner of the Top 10 fending off the massed hordes of superannuated sleigh-bell shakers, armed with the power of the tube girl hair flip transition trend.
McRae’s 2022 debut album, I Used to Think I Could Fly, was noticeably less successful: hardly a failure, but not the stuff to catapult her into the pop super-league where her two most obvious forebears, Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, dwell. Perhaps that says something about McRae’s main flaw: she is an engaging and energetic dancer, but doesn’t have a USP as strong as Eilish’s tendency to gothic melodrama and idiosyncratic production style, or the intrigue of the real-life love triangle that supposedly inspired Rodrigo’s Drivers License. McRae stands or falls on the quality of her songs.
That said, she has spoken about how hard it is to develop an identity when you’re shackled to the modern pop process of “writing with a million different people”. I Used to Think I Could Fly featured contributions from more than 30 different writers and producers – Charlie Puth and Eilish’s brother and chief collaborator O’Connell among them – so its follow-up attempts to narrow things down a bit, and provide more continuity.
Think Later’s lyrics stick with the aforementioned bad boyfriends, bedroom-door-slamming angst and friendship group drama (“said she had my back, but she had the knife”, “half your age, yeah you’re lookin’ at me like I’m some sweet escape”, “I just overshare ’bout things I never meant”), with a Taylor Swift-esque back-to-my-home-town narrative thrown in on Calgary. But this time, OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder is co-executive producer and has a hand in most of the tracks; the sound is more unified, with a hefty application of cavernous reverb linking the electronic stuff and guitar-led tracks.
Sometimes this yields dividends. Greedy is exceptionally catchy, driven by a clanking earworm riff. Stay Done is a nicely written, sweetly melancholy, corporate alt-rock acoustic ballad, while the rhythm track of Hurt My Feelings feels appealingly rooted in the minimalism of the Neptunes’ early 00s productions.
But they are surrounded by a surfeit of songs that, while well made, feature melodies that always head where you’d expect – or try too hard. In its quest for immediate impact, Exes hits on a clockwork rhythm that quickly lands on the wrong side of the line that separates perky from annoying. Chunks of the album fly by making little impression: you can imagine these songs on the radio, but then huge chunks of radio fly by in the same way.
The quest for a USP doesn’t seem to have yielded a definitive answer: McRae is still fitting a lot of currently popular boxes without escaping them. There are highlights, but the overwhelming impression is of placeholder pop, filling space until something different comes along. How Tate McRae will respond when it does is anyone’s guess.
This week Alexis listened to
Personal Trainer – The Feeling
From an album due next year from the Dutch indie troupe, the nine minutes of The Feeling start out brooding, slow and a little Lambchop-like, before surging into a faster, brighter space, and heading back to the starting point.
