Around the time that Addison Rae broke a million TikTok followers in the fall of 2019, the platform offered a system update for the American dream; now all that was required to claim a better, richer life was a phone, some free time, and a willingness to perform air traffic control dances with a smile. For those not on the app, your introduction to the social media star may have been her 2021 Tonight Show debut, a chipper showing, not exactly screaming “star power,” which confirmed my worst assumptions about where youth culture was headed. Rae, who grew up a competitive dancer and later, a cheerleader, brought to the app not just girl-next-door sweetness, but also ruthless pragmatism and a tireless work ethic. On a recent podcast, the 24-year-old performer spoke insightfully of her time in the viral dance mines. “When I reflect back on that time, I’ve recognized how much choice and taste is kind of a luxury,” she noted without shame, summing up her methodology as: “How am I going to get out of here?”

By “here” she meant Lafayette, Louisiana, where her dashed dreams of dancing for the LSU Tiger Girls had nearly given way to the grim prospect of small-town normalcy. A couple hours away was Kentwood, the hometown of Britney Spears, a fellow born entertainer whose precocious talents were both a refuge from family chaos and an ostensible ticket out. Since Rae reintroduced herself as a fledgling pop star—first with 2021’s “Obsessed,” the kitschy lead single from her scrapped debut album, then a slew of leaked demos which sparked her transformation from cheesy striver to cult favorite—Spears has loomed large on her mood board via pap walk, video Easter egg, and a breathless reverence for earthy, girlish glam. But since last year, when Rae threw herself into the role of pop diva with surprising wit and moxie, what has mostly come to mind is Spears’ reminder that a job is a job: “You want a Lamborghini? Sip martinis? Look hot in a bikini? You better work, bitch.”

Rae’s debut album, Addison, floats in on a swell of goodwill following a string of improbably great singles, each one a little weirder than the last. Last August’s effervescent “Diet Pepsi” felt a bit like early Lana in the star-spangled coquetry of its parking lot romance. But where Del Rey sang her torch songs with cool resignation, Rae’s layered vocals seemed to buzz with woozy warmth, punctuated here and there with “Ahh!”s of satisfaction. Its followup, “Aquamarine,” has grown on me since fall—a four-on-the-floor siren song which eagerly begged comparison to Madonna’s Ray of Light or Kylie Minogue’s Fever. The moody minor chords of February’s “High Fashion” were less primed for the charts than for a cuddle puddle at an after-hours flophouse. And there was poignance in the downcast trip-hop of fourth single “Headphones On,” which faced the doldrums with a cigarette and a stiff upper lip. In the video, Rae pops in a pair of wired earbuds and is whisked off from her day job to a manic pixie dream world.

After years of deferring to the professionals in sessions, Rae met Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser in early 2024—a pair of young songwriter/producers signed to MXM Studios, the publishing camp of pop mastermind Max Martin. After writing the hook of “Diet Pepsi” together that same day, the three women would go on to write almost all of Addison themselves, while Kloser and Anderfjärd are the album’s sole producers. What ties its tracks together is less a genre than a feeling—sensual and heady, propelled by private intensity, occasionally euphoric and other times lost in itself. It’s music you can move to, though not exactly “club,” often built atop the stacked chords of the Korg M1 keyboard, whose organ presets epitomized the sound of ’90s house. The mood is often wistful in spite of the ripe imagery—sun-kissed skin, foggy windows, drunk cigarettes and so forth—as if life moved too quickly to relish in real time.

If Addison has a narrative throughline, it’s one you’ve heard before, in which a plucky ingénue strikes out for fame and fortune in the wacky world of showbiz. But Rae is at her most delightful balancing camp and sincerity on starry-eyed numbers in which all the world’s a stage. “You’ve got a front row seat, and I/I’ve got a taste of the glamorous life,” she trills on “Fame is a gun” with just a whiff of desperation, a callback to another Britney adage. (“There’s only two types of people in the world,” Spears sang knowingly on “Circus.” “The ones that entertain and the ones that observe.”) She opens “Money is Everything” with a faux-naive stage whisper: “When I was growing up, Momma always told me to save my money so I never had to rely on a man to take care of me,” purrs the girl who claimed that she dropped her Southern accent because “Marilyn Monroe never said ‘y’all.’” “But money’s not coming with me to heaven—and I have a lot of it!” Rae presses on. “So can’t a girl just have fun?” Cue the beat drop and the chorus, a slightly psycho girl choir whose “Lemonade”-esque harmonies sound like they’re being shouted from the sunroof of a speeding car.

Later in that song, Rae traipses to the DJ booth to request Madonna, then rattles off some shoutouts in a cartoonish yelp: “I wanna roll one with Lana/Get high with Gaga/And the girl I used to be is still the girl inside of me!” She’s made a point of wearing her inspirations on her sleeve, though Gaga’s influence was stronger on her 2023 EP, AR. As for Lana, there are moments (mostly “Summer Forever”) when the Born to Die worship approaches Kirkland Signature territory, with lyrics torn from the inscription pages of a high school yearbook. Rae’s disposition is generally sunnier than Del Rey’s, minus the abjection that invariably shadows romance. But where their mindsets meet is a solemn belief that you ought to live your life as if it were a work of art.

In Rae’s first cover story earlier this year, there’s a quote from Charli xcx—her mentor-slash-bestie whose “Von Dutch” remix marked the first time that Rae came off as cool—that’s been rattling around my head. “Everything she does relates back to her art,” said Charli of her friend’s evolution. “Every item of clothing she wears, everything she says in a red carpet interview, everything she tweets—it all is a part of the world-building.” Initially, I found the idea depressing: a teenage girl who’d changed her life performing to a phone camera, now optimizing her every move for the aesthetic. Then again, there’s something potent in Rae’s winking performance—a borderline unhinged devotion to the American promise that a person’s destiny is entirely in their hands. Why not trade small-town boredom for gonzo Hollywood glam? Why not conspire against reality in favor of romance? Towards the end of the Frou Frou-esque “Times Like These,” Rae hears her own song on the radio and wonders aloud: “Let’s see how far I go.”