All My Inner Thoughts Sound Like Ahh Ahh

Tate McRae “Purple Lace Bra”

My impression of Tate McRae’s earlier music was along the lines of “hey, why shouldn’t there be a new pop artist who is to Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls what The Black Crowes were to The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin?” I don’t see why certain styles shouldn’t continue to exist as part of a larger musical tradition. It’s silly to treat this stuff like it should stay frozen in one cultural moment when so many other types of music are kinda always around.

This take shifted a bit upon spending some time with McRae’s recently released third album So Close to What. The aesthetics have moved up the timeline a bit, and now all the songs sound like a scrambled version of pop aesthetics from the mid to late 2010s. And this makes total sense: McRae is 21, and it’s logical that her taste and frame of reference for pop is basically stuff I heard in Ubers around 10 years ago.

Some of the songs on So Close to What pull from music I have only a vague passing familiarity with, leaving me with low-grade deja vu. Other songs are a little easier to map out – “Purple Lace Bra” pulls a hook directly out of Beyoncé’s “Drunk In Love,” folds it into another section that sounds a lot like Rihanna, and the chorus feels like Reputation-era Taylor Swift spiked with a little bit of Ariana Grande. There’s also a lyrical hook that rephases a memorable part from Olivia Rodrigo’s “Bad Idea Right?” I don’t think the way this song strings together these aesthetics should work, but it does. The “a little from column A and a little from column B” mix-and-match approach turns out to be coherent in this case.

McRae isn’t really known for being coherent. Her vocals are so “cursive” the words often blur together in a way that’s a little like unintentional shoegaze aesthetics. “Purple Lace Bra” isn’t one of her more extreme songs in that respect, and that’s fortunate given the lyrics get a little interesting. She’s singing about getting frustrated with a relationship with a man who pretty much exclusively values her for her body. There’s a lot of resentment in the lyrics – “I’m losing my mind ‘cause giving you head is the only time you think I’ve got depth” – but not enough that she seems like she’s about to dump him. The song takes place at a point on this relationship timeline where the grievance is there, and she’s in the negotation stage of dealing with it. There’s still some room here for the guy to take her seriously, but I’m less hopeful about it than she is.

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