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manysmallhands · 3 months

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The Deep Tate

This is a piece that I was going to do for another website, a kind of “ten songs to know her by’”, but it’s gotten away from that a bit so I thought I’d just put it up here and then if no one reads it then that’s pretty standard anyway. I've done a playlist which i've placed at the end, featuring all the songs i that mentioned along the way (a few too many than i was supposed to talk about).

Canadian pop star Tate Mcrae is a precocious talent, a viral sensation who’d managed to catapult herself to fame before she’d even left her teens. I’ve only known about her for a few months now but she’s already captured me as a fan, with her second album “Think Later” quickly becoming one of my favourites of last year. Mcrae started out in her (even younger) youth as a professional dancer, uploading her self penned songs to YouTube alongside videos of her routines. She first broke into the charts in 2020 - aged just 17 - with the moody revenge ballad You Broke Me First, a massive international hit during lockdown that clocked up over a billion streams on Spotify.

From there, she began to navigate the trickier dance of establishing herself as a regular chart fixture, reaching the UK Top 10 with her increasingly pop/rock focused debut LP, “I Used To Think I Could Fly” in 2022. But the real story is what she’s done since then: 2023 was a huge year for her as she collaborated with OneRepublic star and Taylor Swift associate Ryan Tedder, adopting a more straightforward pop sound and taking the charts by storm. Much of this was down to "Greedy", one of the biggest songs of last year, which took an entertaining swipe at sleazy older men and went top three in every country you might feasibly shake a stick at. Added to that, the release of the excellent ‘Think Later’ album helped to cement her reputation as one of pop’s megastars in waiting.

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Though there’s plenty of earlier material (her first viral hit, the characteristically accomplished “One Day”, was written and recorded when she was just 14 years old), it’s probably best to start with "You Broke Me First". Tate’s first big hit was something that she struggled to outgrow for a while but its uncomfortable intensity still feels striking. Built around a narrative of betrayal, its heroine recounts the hurt of being dumped and her understandable refusal to take the repentant boyfriend back: so far so standard. But what sticks out about it is the low-key vicious tone that underpins the song: the title is a big hint that this is her moment of vengeance and she intends to milk it for all it’s worth. The doomy synthetic backing plays up all of this heavily and the distorted autotune on her slightly husky, cute but tough vocal style only adds to the unnerving vibe of it all. Is this “serious” music? I’m going to say it sounds a lot like it.

But for a while afterwards, whilst not really dropping out of sight, Mcrae did appear to get stuck in the mode of moody trap ballad girl, marketed as a kind of junior Billie Eilish (with whom she’d collaborated previously on the track “Tear Myself Apart”) and seeming to lack a clear-cut identity of her own. 2021’s “Too Young To Be Sad” EP was actually pretty good, with the softer styled “r u ok” (as much as it’s a Billie clone, it is at least a good one) and the warm acoustic closer “Wish I Loved You In The 90s” being particular highlights. But a distinct fault was that it tended to get caught up pursuing lesser versions of her big single to slightly diminishing returns, something that was made all the more obvious by its inclusion. There’s a pattern after a little known singer has a huge hit that looks a lot like ‘bloody hell, what do we do now?’, with talented kids often finding out that they’ve not got much else in the locker. While the quality didn’t drop all that much, the hits were not forthcoming and it looked like Mcrae was starting to tread water a bit.

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But by the time of her first full length album, 2022’s “I Used To Think I Could Fly”, she was beginning to find her way somewhat more purposefully, albeit still in a slightly haphazard manner. Some of its best songs come from a turn to breezy pop rock, with “She’s All I Wanna Be” in particular providing her with both a standout track and a welcome hit single. Centred around comparing herself to the hot girl who threatens her relationship, Mcrae is still working thru her adolescent anxieties but the tone is lighter, the guitars let rip a bit and, combined with her ever keen sense of melody (the characteristic through-line that connects all of her best songs) the whole feels a lot more fun than she’d hitherto managed to project.

That’s not to say that her sad girl tunes were in any sense gone but neither were they all a wash out: indeed much of the strength of her songwriting at this point comes down to the touching believability of her teenager set pieces. The defiant “I’m So Gone” combines a break-up narrative with a punchier trap pop sound, and while there are still a few straightforward YBMF reruns, they were often pretty good once you got used to her patter (the piano led “Chaotic” is a particular highlight). It was clearly a good idea for her to start mixing up her sound though and songs like the wonderfully trashy rocker “What Would You Do?” are an entertaining diversion from all the misery, mining some attitude to clap back at a neglectful boyfriend in a lyrical style that would in time become a lot more familiar. The album still has the odd duffer here and there but the message was clear: Tate was on her way!

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While “I Used To Think I Could Fly” feels like a pretty good debut, it’s not without its flaws. Some of the songs come off as a bit flimsy and there’s also a sense in which it feels more like a grab bag than a fully coherent project. The production roll includes Adele collaborator Greg Kurstin alongside other star names like Charlie Puth and Finneas O’Connell and while there’s certainly a lot of talent on show, it also sounds like a great many cooks are gathered around the pot. But since she released her excellent second album, Tate has entered something approaching a state of grace for me (A Tate Of Grace? A State Of Tate?) and i’ve found it generally easier to get along with her earlier stuff too.

Her shift to a higher level began in late 2022, firstly on the twinkly, bass driven “Uh-Oh” and then more powerfully with“10.35”, a banging DJ/pop girl collaboration with Tiësto that finally managed to push her back into the UK Top 10. Playing to her melodic strengths, it takes the moodiness of You Broke Me First but allies it to a beat that goes enjoyably hard, with her knack for a tune sweetening its combination of dancefloor darkness and pop bounce. This was followed last autumn by a second full-on megahit, "Greedy", the first Tate Mcrae song I heard and one that seems likely to be her signature tune for a while to come. Built around a 00s era Timberland-style beat, Tate recounts a nightclub discussion with an older guy who comes onto her, only to be told “I’ll put you thru hell just to know me yeah yeah!” during its swooping, almost bombastic chorus. Greedy was a mass of insistent hooks, rolling rhythms and snappy hot girl catchphrases that became an instant hit, camping out in the UK Top 5 for weeks on end and hitting #1 on a dozen charts around the world, including her native Canada and the Billboard Global 200.

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Aside from the stylistic changes she’d made since her last round in the spotlight, perhaps the most significant difference from "You Broke Me First" was that this time Mcrae had come prepared with some solid follow ups. Her next single "Exes" kept up the high standard and closed out the year with another top 20 hit. Propelled by a harder trap rhythm than previous efforts, the song is built around an almost childishly gleeful vocal that plays on her new, edgier image, calling out her old boyfriends in a kind of Canadian version of the “Am I bovvered?” routine whilst singing in a fast paced, almost hip hop-style which engagingly breaks through the rhythm of the song. Tate says that she “steps into a different body sometimes when I’m doing songs like Greedy and Exes” and certainly the change here from her previous mopery feels both bracing and wickedly enjoyable.

The album, “Think Later”, followed at the end of the year and was to my mind a much better record that its predecessor. Whereas that LP had at times felt a bit ponderous, producer Ryan Tedder’s rattling beats and snappy arrangements gave "Think Later" a new level of firepower, creating a much more energetic backdrop for Tate’s various romantic misadventures. And this time, rather than simply bemoaning her situation, she seemed far more likely to be putting herself in the driving seat: whether it was her dreams of snaring someone else’s boyfriend amidst the catchy synth attack of "Hurt My Feelings" or the bad girl adventures of the thumping title track, Tate often plays an intriguing central character, one who’s far more liable to be causing mischief than weeping away in private. The more forceful propulsion also keeps the ballads from becoming too gloomy and, just occasionally, as on the excellent messy relationship confessional "Stay Done", Mcrae and her team manage to create something genuinely beautiful, as she calls on all of her melodic gifts and sweet natured charm to turn in a gorgeous acoustic tearjerker.

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“Think Later” has only been out for a couple of months but it already looks set to be a bigger album than its predecessor and her sustained success has led some to speculate whether Tate might be pop’s Next Big Thing, a role seemingly now vacant in this more ephemeral era of Tik Tok hits and viral sensations (a landscape that, as a Youtube native, she appears more confident in than many of her peers). My own feeling is that, while I love her records dearly, I’m unsure whether she’s up to making that transition. Certainly, Mcrae seems to me not quite the finished article. She still needs to take more quality control over the sad girl stuff - whilst it generally works much better on "Think Later", the album closes with two underwhelming ballads, at least one of which should have been left off the record. And while she's perfectly attuned to the swirl of youthful romantic concerns that underpin many of her best songs, attempts to go deeper seem to stumble just a little, with a song like "Calgary" being a case in point - a serious acoustic number which works well aside from a slight clumsiness in the lyrics.

But there's still plenty of time for her to reach perfection. Despite having been around for a while now, it’s useful to remember that she’s only 20 years old: even Taylor Swift wasn’t on her best game for another couple of albums yet. And maybe it doesn't matter that much anyway. I don’t claim anything very sophisticated for Tate Mcrae - no trails are being blazed here - but in terms of my own experience, the most important questions are: would I rather be listening to her than some more acclaimed act who offers far less fun, energy and/or melodramatic weight? Absolutely! Do I often find myself singing along inappropriately to "Greedy", despite not in fact being a 20 year old hot girl superstar? Guilty as charged! The bottom line here is all that she’s already achieved: she’s a talented artist creating consistently thrilling music, the creator of both a songworld that feels increasingly immersive and a style that’s evolved intelligently under huge pressure and, perhaps most importantly, someone who is starting to up the stakes with each successive release. More than anything, she’s a young woman who’s navigated the challenge of moving on from uploading YouTube videos of herself singing into a webcam to taking on the international charts, not just once but several times over. Given that form, I wouldn’t bet against her. As she says on "Think Later", “I do it so well”.

#Tate Mcrae #Pop Music #Greedy #Exes #You Broke Me First #The Deep Tate #Higher Tate Of Consciousness #Tate Of Grace #Tate Of Emergency #Songs Of Love And Tate #Spotify

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