This story is part of the 2025 TIME100 Next. Read Dakota Johnson’s tribute to Tate McRae here.
For Tate McRae, an average night in 2025 means performing to tens of thousands of screaming fans in arenas around the world. Flanked by dancers, the 22-year-old Calgary native undulates across the stage as blinding lights strobe in time with thundering power-pop beats—whipping her waist-length hair, twisting her form into impossible shapes—while she commands the stage with the intensity of a seasoned pop veteran.
But when the lights go down and she finally closes her eyes, the scenes that follow are far less glamorous. McRae says she doesn’t dream, she only has nightmares. And they’re not about missing cues onstage or losing her voice. Instead, McRae says that when she sleeps, her subconscious conjures darker images, like visions of “a massive spider crawling on my wall coming to attack me.”
Although her music is bright and confident, what McRae is describing is an inner world shaped by darkness. At eight, McRae was already channeling her angst into writing poetry and what she calls “dark and twisted” short stories. The recurring theme was a girl locked in a mental battle, who always woke up to find it had all been a dream. “That was my plot twist at the end of every story,” she says. “My teachers loved it.”
That tension—fear after the lights go out, fearlessness under them—sits at the core of McRae’s appeal. At 22, the dancer-turned-songwriter channels her energy into sleek, high-impact pop, building an arena-size community that sees itself in her extremes.
Her footprint is undeniable: 8 million followers on Instagram, just over 13 million on TikTok, and nearly 55 million monthly listeners on Spotify, in line with global icons like Beyoncé (56 million) and rising forces like Alex Warren (54 million). Her biggest song, “Greedy,” has cleared a billion streams across platforms.
Most impressive, though, is her blueprint for longevity. In a pop economy without a monoculture, McRae has engineered momentum that doesn’t depend on a single omnipresent hit. It stacks—venue by venue, post by post—into staying power, grounded in an unusually direct connection to her fans (affectionately nicknamed “Tater Tots”).
“[It’s] so ironic that in front of 20,000 people I have way less fear than sitting in a small room,” she says. “I feel safe on stage, and I feel like this is my moment, where I can take it as far as I want.”
An arena tour filled with fans is any budding pop star’s fantasy, and for McRae, it’s no exception. Yet offstage, McRae considers herself a “raging introvert.” When she’s not on tour, she spends most of her nights at home (or, more realistically, a hotel room), hanging out in a face mask, doodling, and watching a movie like The Shawshank Redemption. She keeps a tight circle of friends (including fellow pop titan Olivia Rodrigo and actor Iris Apatow); she is intensely spiritual; and the Los Angeles transplant’s happiest place is a Malibu beach at night, once the crowds have dispersed. She also tends to avoid social media whenever possible. “I think when people meet me, they get really confused because of my public persona [versus] who I am,” McRae says over breakfast (eggs and an iced matcha with almond milk) at her favorite West Hollywood all-day cafe.
When asked about her musical influences, McRae cites a range of artists, including Lana Del Rey, SZA, Frank Ocean, and Fleetwood Mac. “I have such a hard time pinpointing, because I listen to every genre,” she says. “When I was younger, my parents would play lyric-focused acoustic music, and then in middle school I was in ballet class being exposed to classical music. As I got older, I got into country and storytelling… it really depends on the day.”
As a performer, McRae is most often compared to Britney Spears, due to her scene-stealing dance prowess and ultra-glossy Y2K aesthetic. McRae doesn’t seem to mind the comparisons; at the 2024 MTV VMAs, she recreated the famous black, lace Dolce & Gabbana minidress Spears famously wore to the 2001 ceremony. Also that year, Spears herself interviewed McRae for V Magazine—a significant gesture, given Spears’ well-documented distaste for media attention in recent years. “She’s such an icon,” McRae says about Spears. “I can’t believe she even said yes [to the interview], but apparently she loved my song ‘You Broke Me First.’ So we were just like, ‘OK, cross our fingers. Let’s see if she’ll say yes.’ It was really cool to know that she had watched all of our performances and songs.”
Like Spears, McRae was a performer from the start. At first, 4-year-old McRae trained with her mother, a dance teacher. By 6, after her grandfather gave her a piano, she taught herself chords, started singing lessons, and began writing songs. “I realized that poetry is the same thing as music,” she says. The family spent three years in Oman (McRae’s father is an oil and gas attorney), and after she turned 8, the family moved back to Calgary, where she enrolled at the School of Alberta Ballet, the training school for the prestigious Alberta Ballet Company. “We were a very competitive family,” McRae says. “My brother played hockey. My dad was watching my brother’s hockey games [while] my mom was watching me in the studio.”
The studio wasn’t just a place to express herself, it was a refuge. Bullied at school, McRae left in middle school to learn at home. “[Dancing] was almost like a shield,” she says. “I could go into the studio and block everything out. That was my one thing that I knew I was good at, and I knew I could feel safe.”
Her first big break came in 2016 when she placed third on the 13th season of the Fox reality show So You Think You Can Dance. Her talent was evident from the start: Judge Paula Abdul was so moved by McRae’s audition that she told the then-12-year-old: “I wish there was a word that would describe how much you touched me. That was perfection, and I mean that.”
Meanwhile, she was growing as a songwriter. She launched a YouTube channel in 2011 for her dance videos, and, in 2017, uploaded a spare video of herself singing an original ballad called “one day,” which drew millions of views and led to an independent release. In 2019, McRae signed to RCA Records and recorded a run of minimalist, melancholic bedroom-pop songs—”Tear Myself Apart” (co-written by Billie Eilish and FINNEAS), “All My Friends Are Fake,” and “Stupid.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, McRae went viral again upon sharing the down-tempo “You Broke Me First,” which would go on to soundtrack millions of TikToks.
“I definitely was sad-girl pop at that time,” McRae acknowledges. “I was f-cking sad, and all I wanted to do was write about it. I will always be a happy person with a little tiny bit of sadness within me. And I think that’s what drives all my songs.”
She moved to Los Angeles in 2021. “When I first got [to L.A.], I was juggling through so many different personalities,” McRae recalls. “I had no idea what I wanted, no idea who was guiding me in the right direction [or] the wrong direction.” The shift from professional dancer to singer required a reset. “As a dancer, you get told what to do and how to do it,” she says. “And I realized as a singer, the job isn’t just about how you performed that day, it’s who you are. You have to really define in your head who that is and what you like. And sometimes when you have so much control, it can feel like you have none at all.”
Finding the right team took time, too—something she says only clicked in the last year and a half. “You are constantly getting advice, and you have to sort through what’s actually good,” she says. “That’s impossible at age 17. How the f-ck am I supposed to start a career and present this persona [when I] have no idea who I am?”
While it took a few years for McRae to settle into LA, by now she’s visibly at home amid her surroundings. Even the cafe waitstaff greet her like an old friend, not necessarily because she’s famous, but because McRae prefers to visit the same few restaurants when she’s back in town.
McRae has also made progress carving out an artistic identity—trading downhearted power ballads for sleek, club‑ready cuts that blend R&B, hip‑hop, and dance‑pop. The evolution has paid off: her third studio album, So Close to What, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in early March.
Two months later, McRae notched her first-ever Billboard Hot 100 No. 1: “What I Want,” a soaring duet with Morgan Wallen, one of country music’s biggest stars. Their pairing—while widely praised for its vocal blend—also drew pushback from some McRae fans, due in part to Wallen’s past controversies. “For me, it really was about the song, and me wanting to do country music,” McRae says when asked about the situation. “That was it.”
In July, reports also emerged that McRae and fellow entertainer the Kid LAROI—whom she began dating in early 2024 and who duets on the So Close to What track “I Know Love”—had broken up. On the Monday we met for breakfast, it had been 48 hours since LAROI appeared to confirm the split on X. “It’s weird, for sure,” McRae says of seeing headlines about her love life. “I’m also experiencing it for the first time, like, intensely. I’ve never had this before.”
All of these elements taken together—a sold-out arena tour, a No. 1 song, a No. 1 album, TikTok virality, intense tabloid interest, two SNL bookings (one in 2023 and a second earlier in 2025), an MTV VMAs performance—indicate McRae is emerging as a cultural force. But even if she doesn’t reach the pinnacle, she says she’ll be just fine, so long as she gets to do what she loves.
For now, McRae is focusing on the future. After her U.S. tour dates wrap up, she’s excited to spend more time with friends in New York and “talk about other things than music,” she says. At the same time, McRae is eager to get back in the vocal booth. “On tour, I will write in my journal, but I don’t get the chance to get in the studio and create a full song,” she says. “It’s like my comfort place. I just enjoy going there—it doesn’t really feel like work.”
And much like her friend Rodrigo, McRae’s intention is to assign words to “the moments in life that feel blurry,” as she describes it. “I hope to get as close to authentic as humanly possible.”
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