Tate McRae is ready to take a breath. Since releasing her chart-topping third album, “So Close to What,” in February, the 22-year-old has been on an unstoppable tear, dropping insta-viral music videos and trotting the globe on her 83-date “Miss Possessive” arena tour. Just days before she brought the trek to a close at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum in November, she caught up with Variety over Zoom from her hotel room, reflecting on the tireless run that’s elevated her from budding pop star to major pop contender.

“I’m ready to hermit for a second,” she says with a laugh. “I’m just realizing as I’ve been on tour this
year how much my personality has changed and how much I feel like I’ve grown up and how my interests have changed. It’s so funny because I’ve been on this tour that’s felt so extroverted, and I’ve become completely introverted. And I’m so blessed that it was so incredible, but I’m ready to put a pin in it.”

Understandably so, as McRae started the year with “So Close to What,” an album that brushed off the more introspective fare of past albums in favor of a nostalgic yet sharp sound. Armed with a team of songwriting brass including Ryan Tedder, Amy Allen and Julia Michaels, the project leaned into the crisp aesthetic of millennium-era pop (think Pussycat Dolls and Nelly Furtado) and swiftly became her first No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. For McRae, the refocus on hard-nosed pop came in service of her live performance — high-energy spectacles with heavy emphasis on choreography, as she’s a trained dancer — that countered her instincts as an artist.

“How I write music is really depressing, sad songs. And that’s where my heart and soul is in music,” she says. “So it was such a challenge to be like, ‘OK, scratch all that. How the fuck do I write a song like “Sports Car” and take my brain into another space and push myself?’ I was tapping into a lighter alter ego, a more confident, empowered side that I think sometimes I don’t feel in my own body.”

Even on tour, McRae didn’t waste a moment. She wedged a show-stopping performance of her hit “Revolving Door” at the MTV VMAs between September tour dates and duetted with Morgan Wallen on the Hot 100-topping “What I Want.” Her single “Just Keep Watching,” off the “F1” soundtrack, picked up a Grammy nomination for best dance pop recording in November.

But as McRae’s star began to rise, so did the interest in her as a public figure. A deceptively edited video of her singing into an upside-down microphone on tour spawned countless headlines that she lip-synchs live, something she strongly refutes (“I was like, ‘That’s so frustrating — why is this on ABC News?’”). Her breakup with rapper the Kid Laroi was a social media talking point, and speculation flew that “Tit for Tat,” recorded during an off day on the road and released as a precursor to the deluxe edition of “So Close to What,” was a direct reference to the split.

“I just felt a very strong urge to express myself,” she recalls of recording the song. “That was the one week that I felt the most emotionally bottled up. I was like, I must speak about this right now and write a song. Talking about something so fresh and then releasing it to the world was a very vulnerable and exposing thing. It was really scary for me. But as long as I can take any emotion or feeling and put it into a song and help anybody else if they feel similarly, that’s all I can do, I suppose.”

All the sudden attention is why McRae has learned to cherish her downtime, which she spends writing and reading poetry from the likes of Sylvia Plath and Anaïs Nin. As she enters the new year, McRae is hard-resetting before heading into her next album cycle, which she’ll start conceptualizing in early 2026. “I think the more disconnected you can stay from the reaction of it all and from how people are perceiving you, and the more in tune you can get with your own body, that’s the only way you can stay sane through this all,” she says. “But yeah, it’s been a really crazy year. I think sometimes you don’t even realize what’s going on outside of your bubble. And then you walk outside and you’re like, oh, whoa, things have shifted.”