With So Close To What, Tate McRae moves closer to superstardom

Calgary-born pop star Tate McRae seems to be hitting her stride. 

This March, she'll be making her second appearance on Saturday Night Live, and she's also one of the leading nominees with five awards at this year's Junos.

On top of that, she recently released her third album, So Close To What. It's being described as catchy and nostalgic — but is it enough to propel her to superstar status?

Today on Commotion, music journalists Reanna Cruz and Rosie Long Decter join guest host Rad Simonpillai to explain how Tate McRae managed to infiltrate pop's A-list, and what her new album suggests about the staying power of her pop persona.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Rad: Reanna, how is the new album landing for you?

Reanna: I like it more than her other albums is what I will say. I think Tate McRae is closer to developing her own persona and identity than she's ever been before, and that is making sexy pop music. Can't have any fault with that, you know? The hooks are catchy. I think she's finally settling into what she wants to do as an artist. And the songwriting is very catchy, it's intuitive, and I like that…. I don't know if it's good songwriting per se, but it's catchy and I like that.

Rad: Rosie, how are you feeling about it?

Rosie: I think it's a strong pop record, especially as a radio pop album. I feel like were any of these songs to come on the radio, I'd be grooving along…. I think pretty much the whole album has strong hooks throughout, which is hard to achieve on a pop album. Normally you've got strong singles and some deeper cuts that are not really cutting it. I do think that she really leans into nostalgia in her sound.She's really looking back to the 2000s pop moment, Timbaland production style. She's working with Ryan Tedder, who is a super producer from that era. And I think the nostalgia starts to hurt her a little bit.

I do find myself thinking about the songs she's referencing — Nelly Furtado's Promiscuous is a big one — and that sort of takes me out of thinking more about actually what makes Tate stand out as a pop star. I really like the single 2 hands, which has a bit of a jazzier beat and doesn't feel like it's just kind of a throwback to that era. But that was also the single that charted the worst of her singles, so maybe I'm out of touch. I don't know.

Rad: I think the idea of cultivating a narrative and a persona seems to be an ingredient to being a major pop star nowadays, whether we're thinking of Taylor Swift and how she leans into her personal life or Charli XCX and this whole brat summer vibe, or even Chappell Roan becoming this kind of glam LGBTQ icon, right? Reanna, what's the vibe you're getting from Tate?

Reanna: The vibe that I get from Tate is that she embodies two separate characteristics — and I apologize that this sounds facetious as an American — but one of them is that she is Canadian, and then the other is that she is a dancer. 

Rad: You're just trying to "other" us.

Reanna: I knew very little about Tate McRae prior to the past few weeks. And the things that I knew were that she's from Calgary, she dated a famous hockey player, she dances, big on hair-ography vibes…. And I think it's interesting because we don't really have many pop stars these days that lean into the dancing of it all and the performance, especially post-COVID. 

We're in this era where live music is kind of feeling weird right now. We don't really know what we're supposed to get out of a concert anymore, and we have all of these young artists coming from social media platforms that hit the big stage, and they don't know what to do. There's a lack of stage presence or choreo. And the vibe that I get from Tate is that she is a 2000s pop star in sound, as well as the way that she moves about the stage and the way that she embodies a stage presence that is very faceless, inherently, very personality-less. But you watch her choreo and you watch her dance and you're like, oh, this girl is talented. 

Rad: Rosie, are you agreeing with that? Do you find that Tate has a certain defining characteristic in terms of her persona that's jumping out at you? 

Rosie: Yeah, I would agree that the dancing is the first or second thing you learn about her. I think that she's still lacking, for me, a really defined persona that's going to take her to the top of the charts, you know? I think she's had one top 10 hit on the American Hot 100. And so we're not seeing, like, Sabrina Carpenter-numbers from her yet. And I do think Sabrina Carpenter has a really defined hook in that she's the sweet comedienne, you know? And I think you look at Chappell and you see, OK, brash queer pop star with a drag queen aesthetic. It's really immediately clear who these stars are. And I don't think Tate is quite there yet in terms of being immediately legible in that way. I think she absolutely has a very solid young fan base. I don't know if she's becoming a household name yet for people who are not of the Gen Z persuasion.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.