Addison Rae, who became the perfect pop star, headlines Chicago’s Byline Bank Aragon Ballroom Friday

It was Tuesday night in America, and Addison Rae was singing “Diet Pepsi,” an ode to kissing some boy between soda sips in the back seat of his car, and before you could decide whether she had been conjuring Madonna, Enya, Lana Del Rey or a forgotten plot point from “Twin Peaks,” every molecule in the room suddenly moved in the wrong direction.

“Diet Pepsi” ends with a key change, but not the kind we would expect. Instead of billowing up toward ecstasy, the melody modulates downward, and in concert, that abrupt shift in pressure felt violently metaphysical, as if Rae’s sucralose fantasies were being pushed down from heaven into consensus reality.

What a move. Most new pop stars want only to go up, up, up — first, into the imaginative reverie of their own music, and then, if enough fans buy into their dream, much higher, to the starry, giddy, money-money future they’ve envisioned for themselves. Rae is coming at us from the opposite direction.

She’s fallen into popland from the misshapen clouds of TikTok, a nonstop digital no-place where this particular 24-year-old from Louisiana has spent the past six years amassing her 88 million followers, hoping that a sustained parasocial fascination with her viral dance videos might eventually ferry her to the most elite zones of American celebrity. Having finally shimmied her way out of our little screens, here she is, onstage during her current tour (in this particular show at the Anthem in Washington, D.C.), pixels made real, singing the most exquisite pop songs of 2025.

“Addison” is her debut album, and while perfection doesn’t exist in the real world, it’s hard to imagine how this thing could be any better. Co-written with Swedish song clinicians Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser, Rae’s songs play superb switch-up games with sweetness and tartness, lucidity and bliss, nostalgia and futurism, diligence and nonchalance.

When Rae sings about fame — wanting it, getting it — her desires feel disarmingly genuine, like when she renegotiates the dispiriting premise of “Money is Everything” by screaming, “The girl I used to be is still the girl inside of me!” Money won’t change her. She always wanted it. Besides, there are easier, more anonymous ways to make bank in this world. Doing it through pop songs is a mysterious labor, one that requires forming some kind of psychospiritual bond with an audience you don’t know. Poised and pure, her fame drive registers as nothing less than a heightened desire to belong to the human race.

That said, her music is so easy to enjoy, and if you need to respect it, go right ahead. Rae is an industrious student of old-school pop grandeur, from Prince to Lady Gaga, and a recent concert felt like proof that she had studied Britney Spears’ VMA performances as if they were the Zapruder film.

Writhing through her choreography, her body seemed more attuned to melody than rhythm, and as she continuously twirled her arms overhead, it was as if she were trying to escape a baggy sweater in the sexiest way possible. The opening verse of “High Fashion,” a song with a bass line that throbs like ambition, seemed to contain the question of the night, if not the social media age: “Have you ever dreamt of being seen?”

At the same time, the sturdiness of Rae’s music seemed to be asking that we sharpen our seeing while loosening our dreaming. Visually, her stage production was relatively austere — a small group of dancers, some artful lighting, no video screens. Please use your real eyeballs to see a real pop star.

As for the dreaming, between songs Rae explained her current state-of-self by chirping in the voice of a double-frappuccinoed kindergarten teacher: “Every day feels like a dream!” Maybe this was just a blurt of happy stage prattle, but it felt strangely staggering. Inside a girl’s head, there was a dream. She grew up, worked hard to make it real, and now it’s here. It feels exactly how she imagined it would. Every day.

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Addison Rae

When: 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10

Where: Byline Bank Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence Ave., Chicago

Tickets: Start at $119 at ticketmaster.com/