There’s working hard, and then there’s whatever Tate McRae has been up to over the past few years. Having first emerged in Billie Eilish’s wake with a moody bedroom pop sound, the singer (and former teenage So You Think You Can Dance finalist) had her breakthrough moment courtesy of 2023’s “Greedy,” a floor-filling, ceiling-shaking slice of ’00s dance-pop that reintroduced her as a powerhouse in the mold of Britney Spears. Then came her second album, Think Later, immediately followed by a year-long, sold-out world tour which finished just a few months ago—and now, the release of her third album, So Close to What. “I think as a dancer I’m inherently a workaholic, so time off doesn’t suit me very well,” she says, laughing. (Even this is something of an understatement: Her next tour kicks off in less than a month, and will take her all the way through to November.)
Clearly, McRae has made the most of those rare windows of downtime: So Close to What, out today, is her most self-assured—and best—record yet. On the fiery opening track “Miss Possessive,” she claps back at another girl flirting with her boyfriend at a party over a finger-snapping beat that recalls Goodies-era Ciara, while on “Sports Car”—the clattering production serving as a slick throwback to Timbaland’s mid-’00s heyday—she delivers a racy ode to hijinks in the backseat of a car that could make the “WAP” ladies clutch their pearls. (The latter also came accompanied by an ambitious video that staked McRae’s claim as a rising fashion plate, seeing her bump and grind in a series of archival and couture looks.) Threaded through it all, however, is a sense of greater maturity, as McRae surveys the emotional rubble of past relationships and the carnal thrills of head-over-heels romance (her boyfriend, The Kid Laroi, even features on the aptly titled “I Know Love”).
Here, McRae talks to Vogue about navigating her rapid ascent to fame, the role fashion plays within her creative process—and why ending up with a couple of bruises after filming one of her highly choreographed music videos is always worth it in the end.
Vogue: I was looking back at your schedule over the past two years, and my first question was: Where on earth did you find the time to make this album? You were touring Think Later all the way up to November of last year. When did all this happen?
Tate McRae: That’s a really great question. [Laughs.] Honestly, whenever I had a moment off the road, I was just in the studio. I think as a dancer I’m inherently a workaholic, so time off doesn’t suit me very well. Any time that I wasn’t traveling or touring or doing shows, I was developing the songwriter side of me, which is so different than that touring energy. Being on the road is such an interesting thing. You’re on every single day, giving and performing and putting yourself on display—it feels like one of the most revealing things ever. You’re putting yourself out there to be judged every night, which is weird for the brain to process. You definitely have to be in a certain mode to handle that, and so it can be strange to switch back to the songwriter mode, who is more like my genuine, actual self and feels a bit more connected with reality.
And when you’re going on stage, you’re mostly performing these songs that you maybe wrote two years ago, when you were in a totally different headspace…
For sure. I always find it so interesting because when you’re writing the music, you feel like you’re changing as a person, and as a songwriter, and you forget that everyone else hasn’t heard it yet. So you always feel like you’re six months, a year, two years ahead of your perception of yourself and everybody else’s perception of you. You can feel like you’re growing and changing, but you haven’t quite given it to the world yet, and that can be a mindfuck.
When you’re in tour mode, is it ever difficult to detach from that and go off and live your life a little bit, so that you have something to write about?
I think that’s the balance I’m always trying to find, which sometimes feels impossible. I mean, if I were to write about my life on tour, it would be one of the most boring things ever. The show is the most exciting part of my day, and then I go to bed and watch TV then repeat the same thing for the next 365 days. So you definitely have to build up the energy to go out and experience drama and life and the thrill of it all in order to be able to tap into that—to find that dreamer-like headspace and imagination that your normal self usually has.
Do you have to be quite strict about carving out that time for yourself?
Definitely, and it’s hard for me, because I love going into the studio and performing, so it can sometimes feel unnecessary to do things that aren’t associated with music. But then if I work too much, I do end up getting into the studio and being like, I have no perspective on anything or no emotion behind anything right now. It’s really crucial for the creative process, but also my own sanity.
Now that you have a few albums under your belt, do you find that you’ve settled into more of a rhythm when putting one together? Do you know now when it’s finished?
I mean, I feel like I could pick an album apart until the day of the release. I feel like it’s hard for me to find that “finished” moment. I usually hit a point where I’m like, “Okay, I have nothing left to say, I have no more stories left to tell,” and then a couple of weeks will pass by, and I’ll write three more songs that I love, and want to add them to the album and change the order—just to cause stress to everybody around me and change all of the plans. [Laughs.]
With So Close to What, was there a particular song you finished where you felt like you’d hit on what you wanted the sound of the album to be?
Yeah. There’s a song called “Miss Possessive” which opens the album, and I knew that sound was exactly where I wanted to go—it was heavily influenced by early Aaliyah and early 2000s R&B and those very repetitive melodies. I started from this initial idea of knowing that I wanted to create a dark pop sound, and something really danceable.
Tell me more about the album’s title—is it supposed to be a little cryptic?
I liked the fact that it had a bit of an ambiguous meaning to it. It did feel like it could be connected to the sexier songs and the flirtier songs on the album, especially because I’m talking about that in a much bolder way than I have before. While I was writing the album, I was on tour, living the same day over and over again. It felt like I was trying to change, but I couldn’t quite… I was feeling grown up for the first time, but I’m still 21, which was confusing. I really felt like a woman for the first time—feeling confident about my sexuality and empowered—but then some days waking up and feeling sexualized in a way I didn’t enjoy, and feeling very misunderstood. I felt very conflicted, and like a walking contradiction, and So Close to What perfectly summed that up.
In some of the promotional images, you’re next to a Hollywood Walk of Fame star and walking in front of paparazzi flashes—is there a wink to your relationship with fame in there too?
I mean, I feel so blessed to have such an amazing career, and so lucky to live my dreams every single day. But also, it feels like one of those jobs that literally never ends—you can always be working, you can always be writing, you can always be performing, and you can always have another goal. I mean, it’s probably true for every person, but I feel like you get to some place in your life, and you look to the next day, you look to the next moment. It’s really difficult to stay present, because you’re always wanting to do more or achieve more or be better. And especially in this career, where you’re being looked at under a microscope, it can feel like that a million times over. I think that was interesting to me because I was hitting a few milestones and doing things that I had dreamed of forever, and still not feeling satisfied with myself or my work. And I was like, “Oh my God. Am I going to feel like this for the rest of my life? Is that what this job entails, constantly chasing this perfection that doesn’t really exist?”
How do you feel about that now? Were you able to reconcile those feelings in making the album?
I really do think I have found a way better perspective on it. Now that I’m off tour, I was able to step back and ground myself a little bit with family, be with friends, and realize the things that I was hyper-fixating on aren’t as important as I thought they were. And also that I shouldn’t be putting that much pressure on myself: I’m 21 years old. I don’t need to have everything figured out right this second.
You mentioned that bolder approach on the album, and it does feel more candid in the way you’re tackling love, relationships, sex…
It does feel more grown, in my opinion. It also feels a lot more feminine. I think I really embraced being a woman for the first time—even just in the sense that, in a relationship, a woman’s intuition is no joke. I had never actually experienced so many of these emotions before. I never experienced female rage before. It was just that I always heard other girls talking about it or feeling it, but I never actually experienced it for myself.
Your public profile grew quite significantly during the last album cycle, accompanied by speculation around your love life. Did that additional scrutiny make you more afraid to speak about your relationships in your music, or more emboldened to?
I mean, I am not a personal fan of talking about relationships online or sharing things publicly that should be private. That kind of drama eats at me inside. I definitely don’t love to air out things that should be dealt with between two people. I think that’s just in my DNA. Anyone who tries to say, “Oh, you wrote this song about this person,” and “you wrote the song about that person,” and “that’s crazy of you for doing that...” That just isn’t the way I express myself. And once I release a song, honestly, it’s no longer mine, it’s everyone else’s. It’s for other people to insert their own characters into the song. On a personal level, obviously all the drama online around relationships kind of freaks me out a little bit.
You’ve been working with Brett Alan Nelson on the visuals and styling around this record—how did you first connect, and what did you bond over?
Brett had styled me for a couple of things last year, and I was such a fan of his work—we were going to get him to style some of my music videos, and then he ended up becoming my creative director too. Brett has such a different perspective of me or perspective of my music and my career, and he can be quite scary to work with… he’s not scary, he’s a genius, but his ideas are so ambitious and that can scare me sometimes. But I think that’s a really good thing. I think that fear sometimes can equal your greatest work. He’s been able to push me in ways that I usually wouldn’t go, like with the “Sports Car” video, where we ended up doing 12 different looks that were couture or archival pieces—pieces that have been on my mood board for years. He was able to bring that to life and make it actually happen, which most people wouldn’t even attempt to do, because it requires so much work and time and planning. He’s incredible.
There’s still a throughline from your previous style though, even if it’s scaled up a bit—especially with the sports influences. Last time there was a lot of ice hockey, this time it’s all about motorsports?
I think at the core, that sporty vibe is just me as a person, so it’s always what I gravitate towards. When we were discussing the creative, we wanted to try and show as many different variations of me and try to express all of that through fashion for the first time. Before, I don’t think I’d focused on fashion that much in my creative vision. It’s always been more about the dance or the singing, and this time, the fashion was a big part of telling the story. I think just as you get older, your taste changes, and you’re kind of down to try new things. Earlier in my career, I could be a little stubborn in what I wore or how I looked, but now I just get excited to go onto music video sets and play dress-up and try on my favorite shoes and dresses and be able to step into a new character.
You’re back on the road touring again next month, even though you only wrapped up the Think Later tour a few months ago. It’s a pretty hectic schedule. How are you pacing yourself, and making sure you maintain your sanity amid all of this?
I mean, I took Christmas off… [Laughs.] I’m just really excited for this tour, because it’s all arenas, so I can build a more ambitious tour knowing we’ll be arriving at the same kind of venue every night. But as for my sanity? I think I’ll find that in my time alone, and making sure I’m taking care of myself.
It must be incredibly physically demanding as well though, right? The choreo you do is insane.
Yeah, it’s definitely exhausting, the dancing. I shot a music video yesterday, and I have bruises over my entire body! I just have to keep working out and eating healthy and making sure I’m fueling my body properly. I grew up doing ballet, and it was just as demanding—if not even more demanding—so I feel like that set me up for this world. It’s always worth it in the end.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
