Addison Rae
Royal Hospital Kilmainham
★★★★☆
Addison Rae has conquered Spotify and TikTok, but there’s a moment shortly before she takes to the stage at Royal Hospital Kilmainham when it seems as if she may finally have met her match in the unstoppable force that is the Irish summer.
Rainclouds have brooded over Dublin 8 all day, and minutes before Rae is due on stage they do their worst to kill the mood by unleashing a bone-chilling downpour. As fans scramble for shelter – or just stand there, growing more miserable by the second – you wonder whether the elements might get the better of Rae’s effervescent music. What pop star could sparkle in so soggy a setting?
The downpour finally relents as the former TikTok personality makes her entrance for a dazzling performance that brings such alien concepts as sunshine and glamour to an evening waylaid by the Irish summer gloom. Introduced on to the stage by dry ice and Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U, she materialises singing her biggest hit, Diet Pepsi, while suspended in a contraption that suggests a cyberpunk twist on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
The entrance is Rae in a clamshell. She moves and sings like a Gen Z Britney Spears – both hail from small-town Louisiana – yet Diet Pepsi has a dreamy quality that hints at something more menacing under its swirling surface. It’s bubblegum with bathos.
Rae isn’t pop’s most naturally gifted vocalist: Adele can rest easy. But there’s something wonderfully authentic about the sense of joy she brings to her music. There are better singers and dancers. But few make putting on a show for your fans feel like such uncomplicated fun. We’re all here together; why not have a good time?
This is more subversive than it might initially appear. In an era when pop music has never taken itself more seriously – see Olivia Rodrigo hanging out with The Cure or Billie Eilish trying to save the planet with recycled vinyl – Rae’s old-school vibes feel fresh and new.
Her ascent has been rapid, even by the standards of overnight pop stardom. She had never played a headline show when she kicked off her tour up the road at 3Arena last year. Now, 10 months or so later, she has returned for this cheery encore. Cheery but surely challenging for Rae, who is brave enough to get through the evening – essentially in her underwear – in defiance of the vicious wind whipping through Kilmainham. By the end even her goosebumps must have goosebumps.
Singer Addison Rae in 2022, her ascent has been rapid. Photograph: Noam Galai/Getty Images for Snap Inc.
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Rae is an old-fashioned pop star in that there’s nothing ironic or knowing about her songs: she isn’t in on the joke about her music because there is no joke to be in on. She struts around like a pop boss on Money Is Everything, a banger that’s full of contrasts insofar as it celebrates materialism (“Money loves me! I’m the richest girl in the world!”), though the melody is haunting and disembodied.
The same is true of Aquamarine, escapist pop filtered through her unassuming, down-to-earth persona. She then climbs down to the front row for Charli XCX’s Von Dutch (Rae guested on the remix). Amid the scrum, a screaming fan watches his soul leave his body as he sings with Rae. It’s a reminder that, rain or shine, the point of pop is to put a smile on our faces.
The best compliment you could pay Rae is that her music could soundtrack both a lost weekend in Ibiza and a scary nightclub scene in a David Lynch film. That duality is front and centre of perhaps her best tune, Fame Is a Gun, for which she emerges from the scaffolding at the back of the stage as her dancers don pink wigs.
It’s a brilliantly woozy conclusion to a gig that finds Rae in her element as the girl next door who shimmers like a visitor from another world.
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