Bella Newman
I really should no longer be surprised when Addison Rae drops another banger but three immaculate singles deep into the rollout of her forthcoming debut album, due out sometime in 2025, it’s still astonishing how genuinely high quality each release has been. The FADER ranked “Diet Pepsi” as our second best song of 2024, and “Aquamarine” (plus its Arca remix, “Arcamarine”) was a quietly stylish vogue bop. Rae is now three for three with her latest, “High Fashion,” a breathless pop odyssey that really shows off some similarities to Britney.
One of Rae’s style signatures has been her raw and airy vocals; she doesn’t so much as sing on her songs as melodically exhale, whisper, or croon. This quality is all over her latest song, which takes a subtle atmospheric beat made by producers Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjard, the genius duo behind all of her new songs, and turns it into an impactful and sexy joint. It’s paired with an equally compelling video, which is where the Britney comparison comes in. In it, she writhes and rolls in peak turn-of-the-millennium fashion, at one point posing in a bra in the rain for a shot that looks like it came straight out of “Stronger.” As a song-and-video package deal, “High Fashion” is one of her best.
Like with her previous songs the lyrics could come across as frivolous: she sighs and sings in falsetto about not needing to do drugs because she’s already high off of fashion. “You know I’m not an easy fuck, ah / But whеn it comes to shoes, I’ll be a slut,” she says, almost shyly, on the second verse. But there’s something about Rae — maybe it’s the knowledge that she was (and maybe still is?) a TikTok star — that makes the whole air-headed materialism of the schtick work, feel authentic and believable, and maybe even covetable.
I don’t think since Britney we’ve gotten a pop girl that oozes this sort of midwestern quality in her pop-star identity, the idea of a normal girl that’s been buffed up and glossed until shiny (coincidentally, like Britney, Rae also hails from Louisiana). For Rae, all this contributes to creating a striking, imperfect effortlessness to her music, something that deviates from the Britney comparison but only in the sense that Britney came up in an age of industry scrutinized pop creation; imperfection wouldn’t have been allowed. Perhaps, however, if she debuted in 2025, her career might’ve looked something more like Rae’s. This is something Mel Ottenberg surely must’ve considered while creative directing Rae’s entire rebrand — one of the best music has ever seen.
It feels impossible that Rae’s streak of excellence could keep continuing but by now, it seems she’s won over most of the left-field pop community, and her momentum doesn’t seem to be slowing. Despite knowing there is a whole team behind the new Addison Rae machine, her success has still felt genuinely unexpected and against the odds. That alone makes me want to keep rooting for her.
