Watch Reneé Rapp talk about herself in interviews, and two things quickly become clear: that she fucks, and that she gives none. Through her stints in youth theater (say hello to your 2018 Jimmy Awards winner), Broadway, Hollywood, and aspirant pop stardom, the 25-year-old singer from Huntersville, North Carolina has maintained a sharp-edged aversion to media training of any sort; “people have tried,” she recently told Vanity Fair. During a memorable press junket appearance promoting the 2024 Mean Girls movie musical, Rapp took the “asshole” owner of a tour bus company to task while her co-star buried his head in his hands: “If you’re watching this, I can’t stand you and I hope your business burns.”
The stunts around Rapp’s 2023 studio debut, Snow Angel—like an advertisement for a power ballad called “I Hate Boston” on a billboard in Boston’s North End—frequently outmatched the personality of the songs themselves. Her new album, BITE ME, wants to change that. “My ex walked in and my other ex with her,” Rapp deadpans on “Leave Me Alone,” the buzzy, bratty lead single. “The three of us together, that’s a real tongue twister!”
Surprising no queer person, queer love and dating are fertile ground for the kind of sticky situations that thrive in pop songwriting. To the coffeeshop strums of “I Can’t Have You Around Me Anymore,” Rapp details a series of compromising encounters with a not-quite-friend, not-quite-lover: “Somehow we always end up naked/Nothing ever happens, but it still feels real good.” Caught between blasé indifference and emotional undressing, she’s the type who can knot a cherry stem with her tongue but often ends up in a tangle.
Rapp is a vocal powerhouse, but BITE ME tends to waste her talents on its most maudlin ballads. Her remarkable belting in the extended final chorus of “That’s So Funny” is set against a piano refrain that sounds like it was plinked out by a middle schooler on the family baby grand. “Why Is She Still Here?” is a Winehouse-lite torch song of the sort that landed RAYE on the awards show circuit, and proof that raw talent is not always a substitute for taste. Better are the tracks where Rapp can flex her acting chops: On “Mad,” she can barely hold back a smirk, and her breathy confession that “I think we almost made a baby/I mean we can’t, but we came so close” drags “Kiss It Kiss It” just beyond the blander side of disco-country. Only the generic ’80s synth-pop of “Good Girl” wholly resists Rapp’s charms; since when would she promise to have one drink then call it a night?
Part stage-managed pop crossover and part pretty-good gay Sheryl Crow record, BITE ME never quite convinces you that it’s got something new to share. “Shy” apes Crow’s “Steve McQueen” (itself a shameless rip of Steve Miller Band’s “Take the Money and Run”) down to its hyper-compressed mix, revving up to a gloriously sapphic cheer squad breakdown that would make Toni Basil blush. Rapp was never a Disney or Nickelodeon star, yet her best songs let us revel in an alternate, Dan Schneider-less vision of the channels’ heyday. “Talk Too Much,” the opening track from Snow Angel, gave frazzled, turn-of-the-century indie rock some pop-punk balayage. On BITE ME, “Leave Me Alone” harnesses the Waitresses’ droll new wave like an R-rated Olivia Rodrigo, and album closer “You’d Like That Wouldn’t You” has Rapp doing her best Hayley Williams: “The thought of getting back together makes me wanna die alone!” Both beg you to shout along, but good luck hitting these notes at karaoke.
From 2021 to 2024, Rapp starred in Mindy Kaling’s HBO sitcom, The Sex Lives of College Girls. She quit the show while filming its third season—“Took my sex life with me now the show ain’t fuckin!” she quips on “Leave Me Alone”—and appears reticent to return to Broadway, so for now music is her focus. But while the best actors are perfect conduits, the best pop stars—including artists Rapp admires like Beyoncé and Frank Ocean—are universes unto themselves. Imagine the version of BITE ME that plays the way Rapp spends it: drinking, having sex, having drunk sex, and generally making a mess. A mouthier Lemonade Mouth; a gutsier GUTS—a decisive soundtrack to her chronic indecision.
