Tate McRae: Inside the remarkable rise of pop idol Tate McRae, from reality television dancer to viral TikTok fame and beyond | Explainer
Four minutes.
That’s the exact window of time fans across the country had in April 2022 to nab tickets if they wanted to see her in the flesh.
By the time the clock ticked over to 241 seconds, it was too late. At 18, the multi-hyphenate had sold out her first ever Australian tour in record time – but if you had asked those lucky ticketholders two years prior who Tate McRae was, they likely would have looked at you, stumped.
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Now 21, when McRae returns to Australia for the national Think Later World Tour in November, she’ll be playing at the sold-out 5500-capacity Hordern Pavilion in Sydney’s Moore Park, a venue almost four times the capacity of Enmore Theatre, where she performed on her first Australia tour.
She’s also coming back with an Australian boyfriend – 21-year-old Waterloo-born rapper The Kid LAROI – on her arm, and a 2024 ARIA Award nomination for Most Popular International Artist under her belt.
Her spectacular rise in the more than two years since she first ventured to Australian soil has only become more meteoric – and while, to some, McRae is seen as an overnight success, it’s actually something she’s been actively working towards for almost a decade.
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How did Tate McRae become famous?
“how is life real,” McRae wrote on Instagram alongside footage of her serenading torch-lit fans in Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on July 17, 2022.
It’s a sight that six-year-old McRae, who was born in Calgary, Alberta, on Canada Day in 2003, could have only dreamed of.
At the age of four, McRae had moved to Oman with her family, and two years later, she started dancing recreationally. By the age of eight, she’d moved back to Canada and amped up her training, starting to compete in eisteddfods with Calgary-based Drewitz Dance Productions.
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By 11, she’d started training in all dance styles at YYC Dance Project, the dance company owned by her mother, and had enrolled in the training school for the Alberta Ballet Company.
A tween McRae started rising to prominence in the United States after winning Best Female Dancer at the 2013 Dance Awards, an accolade she would go on to win twice more.
What followed were dance appearances on Justin Bieber‘s Purpose World Tour, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and the American So You Think You Can Dance‘s 13th season – which, at 13, she became the first Canadian finalist of.
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But less than a year after her 2016 appearance on the televised dance competition, McRae’s focus had shifted.
She wanted to be a singer. So, of course, she started a YouTube channel.
“There’s something really special about that because it’s like watching my diary… the feelings I went through, what kind of person I was then to what I am now in my music,” McRae told Vanity Fair of her digital footprint in December, which includes a series of seven-year-old recordings of her performing original songs.
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“I give kudos to my [younger] self for taking a risk like that,” she said.
But she hadn’t completely given up her passion for dance when Sony’s RCA Records signed her in 2019.
It was shelved for her freshman tour – she mainly spent her All the Things I Never Said Tour in 2020 holding onto a mic stand – but by the time her fourth tour in as many years came around in April, it was back full-force.
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“I was able to actually bring through my dancer side that I’ve been wanting to pull out in some way for a very long time,” she told Vanity Fair of finally being able to synch her singing and dancing when performing.
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It’s her dancing prowess that has garnered her an outpouring of critical acclaim, with her intense choreography drawing comparisons to pop queen Britney Spears.
“The teen dance star turned future pop idol” is what i-D magazine billed McRae as in a 2020 profile when she was known for her viral TikTok hit You Broke Me First, but by the time she started dancing her way through 2023’s smash singles Greedy and Exes while singing live, renowned artist, dancer and choreographer Paula Abdul had gone on the record to declare McRae a “gift from God”.
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Her seemingly rapid rise to superstardom – a perception helped in large part by videos of her elaborate concert performances going viral in recent months, as well as an appearance on Saturday Night Live! and a set at the 2023 Billboard Music Awards – has seen her start to field accusations of being an “industry plant”.
A term to describe someone, particularly musicians, who became popular through money or their personal connections within the industry rather than on their own merits, it’s something McRae staunchy denies.
“I’m like, I’ve been grinding since 13 years old! I’m probably the furthest thing from an industry plant for how long I’ve been doing this,” McRae told Variety in December.
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But even McRae has had to come to terms with her breakout year, telling Billboard in November that the weeks following the release of smash single Greedy felt like “a bit of a dream”.
“It’s just been the most surreal moments of my life collected into the shortest amount of time,” she told Vanity Fair in December. “I feel like I haven’t processed half of it because it happened so quickly.”
She wouldn’t change it for the world.
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