Since she reinvented herself with a scream on the remix of Charli XCX’s “Von Dutch” last year, Addison Rae has held my attention, maneuvering with such ease you forget she’s maneuvering at all. There is canny joie de vivre in her campy paparazzi shots, which find her pumping gas in a Saints flat-brim and nip tape, and in her red carpet appearances doing gonzo interpretations of classic Madonna looks. And I still smile when “Diet Pepsi” comes on at the end of Pilates class, as it is so wont to do, with its breathy, effervescent early-Lana energy. In 2021, the TikTok star’s Tonight Show debut teaching Jimmy Fallon those air traffic controller dances added to my mounting pile of evidence that the app was a weapon of social warfare designed to make America’s children too dumb to fight in WWIII. Now her still-unannounced debut album is my most anticipated pop release of 2025.
On first listen, “High Fashion,” the third single from that album, feels a little uneventful—anti-climactic in comparison to the 15-second teaserwhich promised “DRUGS” in hot pink letters, visuals like outtakes from Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, and synth chords that could be samples from Ratatat’s self-titled debut (though they are not). But on listen two, I kinda like it that way—the finger-snap percussion, the synth modulation halfway through the hook, the way it resists buoyancy and sinks slowly instead. As usual, you get the sense that Rae and a crack team of creative directors have tried hard to appear like they haven’t tried at all. And once again, it has worked like a charm.
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