The 21-year-old Canadian multi-hyphenate has barely stopped to take a breath since kindergarten: She began intensive dance training at age six, scored a record deal at 16 and tied for top nominee for the 2025 JUNO Awards. Her third studio album arrives just a few months after the end of her 2024 world tour in support of her sophomore album, 2023’s THINK LATER. “Being on tour for a year feels like a million years—you’re like, ‘Holy shit, I have been gone for a lifetime,’” McRae tells Apple Music, though naturally she used the time as a learning opportunity. “Being onstage every night and analysing yourself that much, you become uber-aware of yourself and what’s going on.” She began paying closer attention to exactly what kind of songs inspired her to move, what beats triggered her dancers to get—in a word—“nasty”. So Close to What is not exactly a club record—more like a pop record you can viscerally feel, conducive to the kind of choreo that makes a killer stage show. Prominent on McRae’s mood board were Timbaland and The Neptunes, whose kinetic productions made the aughts feel like the future. Echoes of sparkly, club-friendly 2000s R&B abound: “bloodonmyhands” recruits Flo Milli for a Miami bass throwback, while “Purple lace bra” lands somewhere between The-Dream’s Love vs. Money and Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die (which checks out, given the latter album’s producer, Emile Haynie, among the credits). And on “Sports car”, McRae and co-writer Julia Michaels found unlikely inspiration in a 2005 crunk classic. “[Michaels] had been dying to reference the Ying Yang Twins’ ‘The Whisper Song’, and I was like, ‘That’s crazy,’” she says. Sure enough, the concept worked. The secret to writing her most grown-up album to date, as McRae explains, was a writer’s room that skewed heavily towards women (including Michaels and songwriter Amy Allen). “With music and finding perspective on situations, no one quite understands like another girl,” McRae explains. “You need another girl to know exactly what we’ve gone through and to know what it actually feels like in order to write a song. When you’re in a writing session, you have to be one brain together, and if it’s not that, that’s when chaos happens,” she went on. “It is so liberating to be with other girls and talk about things that are so frustrating and then feel so satisfied and accomplished after.”