Here’s the thing about witnessing Tate McRae live: The hair shall be whipped, the body shall be dropped, and the poles shall be danced upon.
In August, McRae’s closing number at Lollapalooza Chicago approached something akin to artistic alchemy. An encore of “Sports Car,” her ride-or-die anthem with nearly one billion Spotify streams, saw McRae dip neck-deep into a brutalist concrete bath filled with 660 gallons of paint-like gold goo made by Wesley Goodrich and Blair Adhesives, of Nickelodeon slime fame. When she slithered out of it a molten trophy, some 100,000 festivalgoers instantly became the 23-year-old Canadian’s humble servants. Each head tilt and statuesque pose caused syrupy strands to swing off her chiseled frame. At once raucous and ravishing, the performance looked as if Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle had cross-pollinated with the Kids’ Choice Awards.
The Midas moment had exactly what incipient iconography demands: spectacle, surprise, and seduction at scale, with a savvy ringmaster steering the performance. “This is genuinely the type of pop culture moment people will reference for years,” one online commenter said. “Out with the old and in with the gold,” said another. A TikTok caption distilled the general astonishment more efficiently: “Bitch WHAT.”
On a recent Thursday afternoon in Manhattan, a few days after her W cover shoot, McRae revealed the internal monologue beneath the gilded surface. “I usually black out onstage, but something comes through me,” she said. At a certain point during the Lollapalooza performance, a neuron fired a single warning to her brain: The bath is coming. “I have one chance to do this correctly,” she remembered thinking as she ascended the set’s half staircase to the makeshift molten bathhouse. “Every intrusive thought goes through your brain.” Finally taking the plunge was cathartic. Or at least, McRae said, “physically submerging oneself in liquid is a different sensation.”
Over the past few months, “Tate’s bath” has gone beyond its initial splash of virality into the 20-something collective psyche. Liquid gold, at least for now, is McRae’s version of a seven-foot albino Burmese python named Banana, a Gaultier conical bra, or a dress made of raw meat.
For our interview, McRae wore a midriff-revealing top with jeans and a matching cropped Calvin Klein jacket. As the label’s current “Feel the Fit” face, McRae can be seen shaking her moneymaker to Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart” in a clip from the campaign’s rollout. The summer headliner circuit and high-profile endorsements are something of a victory lap: Last year’s Miss Possessive tour, her fifth concert outing, grossed more than $100 million over 80 shows. “Being a pop singer is the craziest, most overwhelming experience ever,” McRae said. “There are just so many ideas that people project onto you. Being a girl is hard enough.” She paused, as if quietly considering the headlines announcing her status as permanently “finally” arriving, and the corners of TikTok parodying her skincare routine. “It’s a bit of a mindfuck.”
McRae is unusually alert to the surreal mechanics of being “Tate McRae.” By the end of Miss Possessive, “I literally could not look in the mirror,” she said. She described life on the road in Kafkaesque, Truman Show terms. “You’re on a tour that is surrounding you.” When she wrapped in November 2025, she asked her inner circle for “no more conversations” about Tate McRae, please. Instead, she wanted to ask questions, learn about other people, and talk about things other than music. “You really have to make a conscious effort to not turn into the worst person ever,” she said.
Her family is a stabilizing force that functions as an anti‑diva mechanism. McRae was born in Calgary, Canada, to a dance teacher mother and a lawyer father. She identifies her mother, who introduced her to the world of dance, as a creative rock. “She is a witch—so intuitive,” McRae said, grinning. “I’m a witch too.” She ticked off a list of heightened intuitions: She can “see things” in dreams, “predict things,” and “get energies on people very quickly.” She combats stage fright by envisioning idols such as Michael Jackson standing beside her until—poof—the nerves vanish.
Coming of age in Calgary, McRae dominated the elite modern dance and ballet competition circuit. At age 12, she became the first Canadian finalist on So You Think You Can Dance, and amassed a large social media following. “Since I was super young, I had a really hard time putting my feelings into words,” McRae said. “One of the only ways that I could talk to people, and feel relieved, was through movement.”
McRae started posting original music online at 13. All the Things I Never Said, her first EP, came out when she was 16. She released her debut album, I Used to Think I Could Fly, at 18, featuring songs she cowrote with Charlie Puth and Finneas. The breakthrough was her sophomore effort, 2023’s Think Later, with the single “Greedy” reaching No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. The follow-up, So Close to What, topped the albums chart in March 2025. Her first Grammy nomination, for “Just Keep Watching,” followed.
Her high-intensity moves have become a signature. Music videos show her in a cutout one-piece swimsuit on a stationary workout bike, or doing choreographed street scenes à la David LaChapelle’s early MTV VMA promo shoots. The video for “Revolving Door” depicts the cyclical nature of toxic relationships and grueling performances as McRae, clad in white cotton undergarments and matching white pumps, thrashes and frantically clutches her head. The video ends with her collapsing to the ground, turning to the camera between sobs to ask: “Again?”
Live appearances, including her 2024 BRIT Awards performance, which saw her traversing the venue like an American Gladiator, have further demonstrated McRae’s pop prowess. The New York Times declared that her “thrilling precision” onstage “positions her as a Britney for the smartphone era.” McRae is cognizant of the comparisons. “Because the work that I’m doing right now is pop music, people perceive my personality, or my brain, in a specific way,” she said. She has also withstood some controversy. Her 2025 duet with Morgan Wallen, “What I Want,” brought her first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 but also led to political assumptions by proxy from the peanut gallery. “It’s crazy to think that one song could define a whole person,” she said. “There are many aspects of my personality that three-quarters of my audience has no idea about. You hope one day you figure out a way to show all aspects of it.”
McRae prefers discussing the golden era of artists. As a child, she analyzed Bob Fosse musicals and obsessed over works by Barbra Streisand and Gene Kelly. “The greats in dance are so much of what performance is today,” she said. The minimalist bottle for TATE 01, her first fragrance, was inspired by a different throwback period: 1990s supermodel campaigns and early-2000s powerhouse Gisele Bündchen, whom she calls her “muse.” “Gisele was always so youthful and fresh,” McRae said. “I want to make sure that comes through my stuff too.” Developing the perfume gave McRae the opportunity “to finally create something where it’s not me.”
As her fame grows, one can feel McRae asking herself: What becomes of all this? “I am constantly chasing the adrenaline of being onstage,” she said. “At the same time, I am also a sponge. I love learning, and then fixing myself. When I can fit the puzzle piece, it’s very satisfying.” On October 18, McRae will perform at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, where the line between performer and image will become especially literal. “My body is the costume,” she said.
Hair by Evanie Frausto for Redken at Streeters; makeup by Kennedy for Neutrogena at Streeters; manicure by Analysse Hernandez for Kiara Sky at Opus Beauty.
Photo Assistant: Alex Jiang; Post-production: Louwre Erasmus At Quickfix; Stylist’s Assistants: Elissa Dziersk, Dylan Gue, Tori López; Hairstylist’s Assistant: Gratia Arguelles; Production Assistants: Ariana Kristedja, Jackson Wakefield, Ariel Steinbach, Justin Oceguera; Tailor: Lindsay Wright. Special Thanks To The Standard, East Village.