RENEÉ RAPP - Bite Me

They said Brat Summer was over, yet a year later young singer-songwriters keep popping up, each aiming to play the role of pop's next reigning Baddie. The latest case in point is Reneé Rapp, 25, from North Carolina, whose already accomplished career as an actress, both on stage and on screen, hands her a considerable head start in popularity, at least in the United States. Reneé now leans on her image and charisma to fulfil another of her dreams, becoming a pop star, a goal well within reach thanks to a genuinely compelling voice. And so in 2025 "Bite Me", her second album (the first, "Snow Angel", came out in 2023), turns into (unexpectedly?) one of the brightest, most successful pop records of the summer.

The numbers back it up: in the week before mid-August, "Bite Me" hits the top spot on the album charts in the Netherlands, Scotland and England (no small feat, in the middle of full-blown Oasis-mania driven by the reunion tour), number two in Belgium, number three in Australia, the United States and Austria, number four in Germany. Not bad at all! And it gets there riding on the most bratty of singles, "Leave Me Alone", which racked up three million YouTube views and 40 million Spotify streams within days. The style recalls Olivia Rodrigo, guitar-driven pop with a fun, super-explicit lyric about record-label pressure and sapphic love affairs. But above all, Reneé sings about a generation's hunger for independence, ready to break the rules, and she does it by leaning into a sexy image, that of a brazen "party girl" chasing freedom and carefree abandon.

"Leave Me Alone" is also the album's opening track, immediately setting a party mood that the following "Mad" reinforces with gusto (it's not hard to spot more than a few Taylor Swift references in there), another chart-smashing anthem. But "Bite Me" also moves in other directions: take "Why Is She Still Here?" as an example, built on a laid-back jazzy atmosphere, played like a comfortable rug for an Amy Winehouse-style voice to settle onto, only for you to suddenly find yourself in the company of Nothing But Thieves: elegant, and disorienting in its own way.

Reneé also shows her intent to craft effective dance-pop hits: on "Kiss It Kiss It" the American singer draws a line running from Kylie Minogue all the way to Sabrina Carpenter, while on the following "Good Girl" she instead chooses to dive headfirst into the Eighties, and on "At Least I'm Hot" she shifts toward r&b territory.

But “Bite Me” is also a work that includes unmistakable rock elements, particularly on the closing "You’d Like That Wouldn’t You" and on "Shy", where Rapp lets all her admiration (confessed in a couple of recent interviews) for Alanis Morissettte shine through, an absolute icon of female rock songwriting. There's no shortage of more enveloping moments either, in the shape of introspective downtempo ballads: "Sometimes" and "That’s So Funny" are piano-led, while it's the guitars that shape the development of "I Can’t Have You Around Me Anymore" and "I Think I Like You Better When You’re Gone". It's clear from the titles alone just how firmly themes of love gone wrong (always strictly framed from a female perspective) and infidelity are embedded in Rapp's songwriting.

A couple of objectively minor tracks don't stop “Bite Me” from ranking among the best American pop records of 2025, well above the recent efforts of Miley Cyrus or Addison Rae (just to name a couple of the most talked-about examples): I wouldn't be surprised if, in the coming months, it managed to pick up some major accolades. A star is born…

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21/08/2025