McRae’s music is wildly successful, well-made but rote, and she lacks a USP to match peers such as Billie Eilish or Olivia Rodrigo
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.
