For better or (mostly) for worse, influencers are a substitute for our love of media consumption in a day and age where the attention economy and a dying Hollywood can’t afford to produce content fast enough to keep up with the average person’s entertainment consumption habits. The quality isn’t always quite high brow caliber, but it’ll do in a pinch when you need a minute-long distraction from doom scrolling. Addison Rae has thirst trapped that formula toward her advantage in relatively convincing fashion by transitioning her platform from a dancing TikTok star to potentially the next big pop star on her debut album, Addison.

What’s so very influencer-like of Addison is that for an album named after the artist itself, the real stars of it are its production team of Swedes and Max Martin protege, Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser, who over-deliver in the aesthetics department. Here, they’ve given Rae severely faultless beats to position her ethereal vapor voice over that would otherwise make it impossible to question whether or not the singer is the real deal, if only it weren’t for that whole origin story of how she got signed to a record deal by presenting a mere mood board citing other artists’ work as inspo. We’ve only seen evidence of her songwriting work in action through carefully curated images of her in the studio, which again, is very influencer in a “everything on social media is fake” sense.

It’s telling who her influencers are, nevertheless. If you find yourself yearning for the taste of “Cola” and the feels of “Summertime Sadness” found in Born to Die-era Lana, there’s “Diet Pepsi” and “Summer Forever”. Need a fix of BRAT hedonism for your 2025 summer? Here’s “Fame is a Gun” and “High Fashion”. Madonna’s 1998 pop-electronica classic, Ray of Light, attempts to beam through sleek synth designs in the frozen waters of “Aquamarine” and the drowned world of “Life’s No Fun Through Clear Waters”. For her part, Rae’s role is that of Anderfjärd and Kloser’s muse bridging millennial trends between her ultra-modern contemporaries’, condensing the best parts of them into a worst case pretty good substitute for clout and a best case promising substance.

It’s fun! The production being the stylish sonic veneer that it is especially gives it its allure. But then again, knowing how influencers work, it also wouldn’t be surprising if her pop star career ends up being a convincing, yet momentary vanity side-conquest until the next career pivot comes along. For now, Addison at least guarantees Aughts pop classic cult status alongside pre-social media influencers Paris Hilton and her own self-referential debut, Paris.

Highlights: “Diet Pepsi”, “Fame is a Gun”, “Headphones On”

Addison Rae’s Addison is available now on Columbia Records.

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