While 2025 pop was mostly led by established A-listers with already-minted legacies, one still-rising star danced her way into their ranks, building her own legacy in real time.
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 all the next two weeks. Last week, we revealed our Honorable Mentions artists for 2025 as well as our Rookie of the Year and Comeback of the Year artists. Now, we reach No. 7 on our list with an artist who earned her way to pop superstardom the old-fashioned way, with big singles, bigger videos and electrifying live performances: Tate McRae.
Listen to our Greatest Pop Stars podcast discussion about Tate McRae’s breakout year here.
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In the mid-2020s, a lot of the defaults of pop stardom seemed to be reversed from where they were 20 years earlier. Breakout artists are more adult than teen or college-age, more diaristic than danceable, more relatable than aspirational. We praise pop stars for showing us who they really are, not simply showing us what they can really do. Enter Tate McRae.
While many pop stars in the post-Taylor Swift era started out as songwriters and developed the looks and moves — or didn’t — to ultimately play the part, the Canadian McRae originally came up in the mid-2010s as a dancer, only adopting writing and performing her own songs after achieving YouTube popularity in her teens for her dance videos. She gained a following and signed to RCA, scoring moderate pop hits in the early 2020s with the gloomy “You Broke Me First” and seething “She’s All I Wanna Be.” But it wasn’t until 2023 breakout smash “Greedy” — with its slamming beat, big-time chorus and choreo-heavy, hockey rink-set music video — that she really showed her potential for being a more classic pop star, the way TRL used to make ‘em.
In 2024, McRae rode the momentum of “Greedy” to further hit singles (“It’s OK I’m OK,” “2 Hands”), with an increased emphasis on music videos and a growing prowess as a live performer, as her Think Later World Tour brought her all over Europe and America and even took her to New York’s Madison Square Garden for the first time. She ended that year an Honorable Mention in our Greatest Pop Stars list, with us writing that she had “yet to quite equal that [‘Greedy’] ubiquity with her subsequent releases — though with a new album scheduled for February (and another world tour starting the next month), she certainly seems like a strong bet for 2025.”
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That bet would have paid handsomely. McRae leveled up like few other pop artists in 2025, realizing her full star potential in spellbinding fashion across various singles, albums and performances — and proving pop still had a place in its center for the daughters of Britney and Xtina. By year’s end, comparing Tate to those legends didn’t even feel that far-fetched.
Her 2025 started already in high gear with “Sports Car,” a no-doubt hit about a certain kind of backseat driving, whose squelching, knocking beat and naughty-but-self-censored chorus called back to Ms. Spears’ Neptunes era in all the best ways. Playing the part of Pharrell alongside McRae was once again Ryan Tedder, the OneRepublic writer-producer who used his work with the rising pop performer to show that when it came to pop bangers, he could do big and loose as well as he did tight and tense. The song was a top 20 Billboard Hot 100 hit, and the stunning, Bardia Zeinali-directed video – Gaga-esque in its many costume changes and elevated art direction — gave the then-21-year-old the glamor and desirability to fully step into her role as a pop teen idol.
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“Car” built momentum perfectly for the release of third studio album So Close to What four weeks later. The album was McRae’s biggest-sounding and most self-assured yet, and its commercial performance demonstrated how she’d made the leap to no-qualifier-needed pop stardom, debuting atop the Billboard 200 — her first No. 1 album — and moving 177,000 first-week units. So Close also launched 12 songs on the Hot 100, with the highest-bowing of the new entries being the No. 22-debuting “Revolving Door,” a pulse- and heart-racing song about romantic exhaustion whose frenetically choreographed video ended with a spent McRae understandably breaking down in tears.
Her biggest chart hit of the year wasn’t on So Close to What, though, and it wasn’t really even her own song. “What I Want” was featured on Morgan Wallen’s May-released blockbuster I’m the Problem, and featured him teaming up with both a dead-center pop star and a female artist for the first time. When McRae was initially announced pre-Problem as said female, she did catch some heat from fans unsure of why she would collaborate with the sometimes-problematic country superstar. But despite the backlash, the song’s commercial returns spoke for themselves: “What I Want” debuted atop the Hot 100, McRae’s first No. 1 on the chart, and the song is still hanging around the top 20 several weeks into 2026.
The hits kept coming for McRae as the year progressed, and later that May, she found herself at the center of another of the year’s most-anticipated releases: F1 the Album, musical accompaniment to the Brad Pitt-starring, Formula 1-themed action flick of the same name. While the soundtrack was packed full of globe- and genre-spanning superstars, the only song from it that made major commercial impact in the U.S. was McRae’s “Just Keep Watching,” another frantic club track with an eye-poppingly athletic visual. The song climbed to No. 33 and lasted 20 weeks on the Hot 100, further establishing McRae as one of the most formidable and consistent hitmakers in pop.
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By midyear, it wasn’t just the charts where Tate McRae was doing damage. On her Miss Possessive tour, launched in March, she’d graduated from playing amphitheaters and pavilions to arenas — multiple nights in some cities — and by 2025, she had both the level of production and the catalog of hits to more than justify the venue upgrade. The best advertisement for the tour came in September, when she received a spotlight moment at the MTV Video Music Awards for a semi-literally scorching medley performance of “Revolving Door” and “Sports Car” — with shooting flames, a sandpit, a phalanx of marble-statue-looking male backup dancers and a jaw-droppingly contorted McRae proving her physicality as a pop performer to be truly without peer. It was an absolutely electrifying performance, and one that truly earned the comparisons to Britney Spears, both in terms of its obvious excellence and its meeting the moment on one of pop culture’s most storied platforms.
And the hits weren’t done yet. “Tit for Tat” dropped in September as a response to her hitmaker ex (and “I Know Love” collaborator) The Kid LAROI’s single “A Cold Play,” commenting on the end of their relationship. “Tit for Tat” was written and recorded by McRae on the road and released just weeks after LAROI’s, moving at the speed of pop music and generating enough excitement to enter the Hot 100 at a career-best No. 3, also tying “Greedy” for her highest peak on the chart to date. Despite its rushed recording and release, the song was also a step forward for McRae as a writer, with her most pointed and focused lyrics to date, and a knockout chorus that became one of her biggest fan singalongs yet.
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McRae ended the year with the late-November release of So Close to What‘s deluxe edition, tacking on both “Tit for Tat” and four brand-new songs, all of which also hit the Hot 100, and multiple of which expanded upon that previously released single’s post-breakup venting. By year’s end, she had reached the Hot 100 a total of 19 times — spending all year with at least one hit on the weekly chart — and ironically, the biggest of those hits was the one she perhaps paid the least post-release attention to, as “What I Want” has still yet to receive a video or a live performance featuring McRae. But that just means that unlike with some pop performers with one hit that towered above the rest, McRae’s 2025 could not be defined by a single song; her year was far too packed for that.
Moving forward, it seems more possible than ever that one day Tate McRae will evolve into the kind of higher-concept, more vividly lyrical pop performer that has largely defined the mainstream this decade, if she wants to — she’s still just 22, and the growth (and the work ethic) that she’s shown in 2025 demonstrates how few limits there are to her potential. But her 2025 also shows why she doesn’t have to change at all: She can still compete at the highest levels of top 40 stardom simply using the classic pop star recipe of big bangers with captivating music videos, delivered by a performer you have no choice but to just keep watching. The pop world should always have more than enough room for both.
Listen to our Tate McRae Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 podcast discussion here, check back for our No. 6 artist tomorrow, and stay tuned the next two weeks as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of 2025 on Friday, Jan. 30!
