When Tate McRae punctuated her debut with blunt ruminations on teenage love and coming of age, the dance competitor turned pop singer was heralded as Canada’s answer to Billie Eilish. For her second album, THINK LATER, McRae toughens up that first impression by becoming a Canadian Sporty Spice, trading neon sweatshirts for hockey gear. It’s a classic formula: Good girl goes man-eating badass, and she’s ready to make that jerk regret losing her. Too bad she’s still hung up on him—and THINK LATER is full of homogeneous trap-pop ballads devoted to one-dimensional introspection.
To showcase a “feistier” version of herself, McRae assembled a roster of prominent pop writers and producers, including OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, SZA’s SOS collaborator Rob Bisel, and Ariana Grande associate ILYA. They land on a style that’s undeniably indebted to Bangerz and the 2010s obsession with trap-pop, updated to iterate on SZA’s love-hate yearning and the Weeknd’s atmospheric alt-R&B. On “run for the hills,” McRae explores the lure of an unhealthy relationship under a looming cloud of synth that’s pierced by single words in her head voice, like Grande rapping “gimme the loot!” on “7 rings.”
Most of the album is similarly concerned with presenting McRae as the give-no-fucks bad girl. “It’s not a good night if you don’t take it too far,” she winks on the arena-stomping title track (which sounds a little like M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” itself). The Timbaland-inspired “greedy,” one of the first and best songs on the record, is McRae at her most empowered and exciting. At other times, the pettiness is just tiring. “we’re not alike” is a pop punk-lite temper tantrum about a friend who breaks girl code; it’s as if McRae attempted to emulate Eilish’s “Copycat” without the bite.
Throughout THINK LATER, McRae’s narrator yearns for the kind of toxic romance that makes Harley Quinn and the Joker look restrained. “You’re the only one who can boil my blood/And make that shit cut,” she warbles on the clunky, mid-tempo “messier,” which sounds like a good reason to finally dump him. Then she goes starry-eyed: “’Cause you know that I’m always yours/I’m so in love.” Where SZA might plot a murder, McRae threatens to make a scene at dinner. The cycle is vicious but worse, it’s dull. Has Tate McRae ever considered protecting her peace?
There’s another school of thought that likens McRae to Britney Spears, recognizing a dancer’s magnetism and competitive edge. McRae’s inability to produce equally compelling music leaves her in a bind. The more comparisons she earns, the more THINK LATER feels anonymous: stuck romanticizing the negative in an attempt to prove her seriousness as a singer. Her music is strongest when she tosses the ballads in the bin. When she rode into the impeccably choreographed “greedy” video on a Zamboni, she looked like a budding star, and when she sings about a random guy who asks if she’s aware of her powers, her response is perfectly dry: “I said, ‘Lemme check.’” Sucks that the rest of THINK LATER can’t muster the same easy confidence.
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