In early June, Tate McRae celebrated her recent move to New York by catching Knicks fever. It was less than a year since she relocated from Los Angeles, where she kick-started her career as music’s next Main Pop Girl, yet she could feel the electricity coursing through her new city over a potential championship win. So she did what any young celebrity would do: She put on a Knicks T-shirt and headed up to Madison Square Garden to watch Game 4 from a suite with her close friend Hailey Bieber. “I really was the one who jumped on the bandwagon. I was like, ‘I love New York!’” says McRae with a laugh.
It’s now a few weeks later — the late afternoon of the Knicks’ victory parade — and she’s seated in a conference room of a photo studio overlooking the Flatiron District. On the streets below, vendors are hawking bootleg merchandise as stragglers from the festivities color the sidewalks with blue-and-orange jerseys and hats.
McRae, meanwhile, is just trying to blend in. Near the end of the shoot, she glides from room to room, swarmed by her team. Few heads turn despite her tall, unmistakable frame shuffling across the floor. As much as she has been seen these days — which has been a lot, to the tune of more than a million Tater Tots (her fandom name) at her latest tour — she’s still unsure how to deal with the glare of thousands of iPhones. She’s figuring herself out, like any 23-year-old would, by clinging to her journal.
“You’ve gotta learn yourself. You have to write down, ‘What are my favorite songs? What are my favorite colors? What are my favorite references? What are my favorite movies?’” she says. “That, I think, shapes your identity and hopefully comes across through you as the vessel.”
It’s been about seven months since she concluded her “Miss Possessive” tour, an 88-date worldwide trek that grossed more than $100 million, and she’s finally coming back down to earth. The experience was unparalleled for anyone her age, bringing the kind of attention that sends our best and brightest stars into spectacular spirals. (Think Britney Spears, with whom she’s endlessly compared.) For McRae, the concerts were so overwhelming that she can’t even recall the finale at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum in November. When asked about her electric piano not cooperating as she stood behind the keyboard that night, she draws a blank: “I have early signs of dementia, I think, because I can’t remember anything that’s ever happened to me.”
To the world, McRae is a strong, fearless entertainer, a triple threat who can pen songs that recall the fizzy pop of the early aughts and bring them to life as a ferocious singer and dancer. But in her new home, she’s relishing the cloak of anonymity that only New York can offer. She set up shop in NoHo, frequenting her local coffee shop and going for hot Pilates. She’s read some books — recommending Sidney Sheldon’s 1982 thriller “Master of the Game” — and learned how to cook three things: ground turkey, eggs and sweet potatoes, the latter of which she makes in an air fryer. On some days, she’ll walk through Washington Square Park or talk with random strangers; on others, she’ll log on to Zoom for meetings with her team.
Life is, for now, normal, whatever that means. But that’s about as normal as it can get for a pop star of McRae’s standing. Over the past few years, the Canadian native has risen from a YouTube upstart to what some are christening Gen-Z’s answer to Spears. Her breakthrough sophomore album, 2023’s “Think Later,” was a purposeful shift from introspective balladry to Y2K-era pop, spawning the Nelly Furtado-indebted single “Greedy,” which climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. A little over a year later, McRae hit full throttle with “So Close to What,” which bowed atop the albums chart in February 2025. Not long after, she scored her first Grammy nomination with the slick “Just Keep Watching” off the “F1: The Movie” soundtrack.
Amid it all, McRae’s stock continued to rise in celebrity circles. Following the Grammys, where she came up empty-handed, she put the loss behind her at Charli xcx’s after-party. In May, she made her Met Gala debut in custom Ludovic de Saint Sernin and held hands with Blackpink’s Rosé as they stepped into GQ’s post-gala fete. After the Knicks’ historic Game 4 win, McRae and Bieber headed down to the club Zero Bond to hobnob with Sombr, the Haim sisters and Taylor Swift, who had previously sent her a homemade loaf of sourdough bread.
“The basket smelled amazing,” McRae recalls, leaning forward as though she’s letting me in on a secret. “I don’t know what perfume she wears, but I was like, ‘She must smell incredible.’”
In July, Swift invited McRae to attend the wedding of the century at Madison Square Garden, and a few weeks later, McRae was back in Los Angeles to deliver the match ball at the opening of a FIFA World Cup game.
“I think she just stands out so distinctly,” says Bieber, who attended husband Justin Bieber’s Skylrk World Cup party with McRae following Spain’s title win on July 19. “You can’t help but want to listen and watch her. She works her ass off. She’s making a clear mark.” It only helps, adds Bieber in an email, that McRae is gracious with those she chooses to keep company with: “Tate is as sweet as they come. I may be biased when I say I love a Canadian” — like her husband — “but I really do. She is salt of the earth, grounded and always fun to be around.”
At Blonde Studios in New York City, McRae appears to be enjoying the leisurely pace of a photo shoot. She’s tried on several looks and ends the day in jeans and a denim-meets-tiger-print spaghetti-strap top. She loves the jeans so much, in fact, that she asks her team if she can keep them. You wouldn’t know it from her bubbly disposition, but her songs tend to be the tell: McRae can’t help facing her darkest thoughts in her music. It’s evident on songs like “Nostalgia,” where she sings of having “a lot to lose, so I might as well lose it anyway,” or on “Horseshoe,” a cinematic tune in which she asks, “Where should my sadness go?”
McRae speaks as though a giggle is always on the verge of escaping her lips. But she’s clearly overcome by her inner monologue. As she discusses the swings of her career, she’s candid about the pressures of fame and its often crushing weight. She looks back on the emotional comedown from the “Miss Possessive” tour, for instance, and muses about just how deeply it embedded itself under her skin.