Tate McRae, the competition dancer who sang sad songs first and danced to No. 1 later

Tate McRae

Photo: Krainagrzybow / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 1, 2003 Calgary
Occupation	Singer
Awards	Juno Award for Artist of the Year · Juno Award for Single of the Year · Juno Award for Album of the Year · MTV Video Music Award for Song of the Summer · MTV Video Music Award for Best Editing

Before Tate McRae sang a note in public, she had already been named best female dancer at the Dance Awards in three different age categories and finished third on So You Think You Can Dance, a show on which her own country was not allowed to vote for her. Then she went the other way. The songs that made her famous were heartbroken ballads written and recorded in her bedroom, posted to the same YouTube channel that had carried her competition routines. The pop star who now walks the Victoria’s Secret runway in red with a line of dancers behind her is that dancer put back at the centre. Whether her records can carry the weight her choreography carries on stage is the open question as she starts on her fourth album.

She was born in Calgary, Alberta, on Canada Day 2003, the daughter of Tanja Rosner, a German dance teacher, and Todd McRae, a lawyer working for oil and gas companies. Her father’s work took the family to Muscat, in Oman, for three years when she was small. Dance came from her mother’s side of the house: from the age of 11 she trained in every style at YYC Dance Project, the company her mother owned, and studied ballet at the School of Alberta Ballet. A silver medal as a soloist at the 2015 Youth America Grand Prix earned her a two-week scholarship with the Berlin State Ballet. In 2018 her win in the teen category at the Dance Awards made her the first dancer in the competition’s history to take best female dancer at every level from mini to teen.

Television carried her beyond the dance world. On the thirteenth season of So You Think You Can Dance, in 2016, she competed for America’s Favorite Dancer as a young teenager from Calgary, mentored by Kathryn McCormick, and placed third, further than any Canadian before her. Meanwhile her YouTube channel, opened in 2011 for dance videos, changed course: in 2017 she began posting songs she had written and recorded at home; the first of them, One Day, passed 40 million views, and she released it herself as a single.

RCA Records signed her in August 2019. Her first EP, All the Things I Never Said, arrived in January 2020, and that April You Broke Me First did what the label had hoped for: it reached the top ten in the United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands, gave her a first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed on that chart for 38 weeks. Because it happened under pandemic restrictions, most of her television performances were filmed in empty studios, and David Friend of The Canadian Press called her “a bonafide star of the lockdown”. Too Young to Be Sad, her 2021 EP, became the most streamed EP by a female artist on Spotify that year, and her debut album, I Used to Think I Could Fly, followed in May 2022.

The turn came with Greedy. McRae had spoken at the end of 2022 about wanting a more openly pop “new chapter”, and the single she released in September 2023 put the choreography at the front of the song as well as the video. It became her first number one on the Billboard Global 200, topped the Canadian Hot 100 and reached number three in the United States. Think Later, the album it led, entered the Billboard 200 at number four that December. The Juno Awards followed in a steady stream: artist of the year and single of the year in 2024, four awards in 2025 for Think Later and Exes, and four more in 2026 for So Close to What and Sports Car.

So Close to What, released in February 2025, was her first number one on the Billboard 200. The Miss Possessive Tour that followed sold about a million tickets and grossed $110.8 million, according to Billboard Boxscore. In May her duet with Morgan Wallen, What I Want, entered the Hot 100 at number one, the first chart-topper of her career. Just Keep Watching, from the soundtrack of the Formula One film F1, won two MTV Video Music Awards that September, song of the summer and best editing, and brought her a first Grammy nomination, for best dance pop recording.

The comparison that follows her everywhere is Britney Spears, and McRae has called it both “flattering” and “scary”, adding that the older star is “the blueprint”. Several reviews of So Close to What argued that the parallel holds far better on stage than on the record, where a number of tracks blur into one another. The point lands on a real fault line in her work: the choreography, the staging and the styling are where she is most distinctive, and a streaming file carries none of them. A second friction is closer to home. In February 2026 she appeared in an NBC advertisement cheering on Team USA at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, and many Canadians took it as a betrayal; she answered with a childhood photo of herself holding a Canadian flag and the line “Y’all know I’m Canada down.” At the end of March she won four Junos and was absent from the gala where most of them were handed out.

She spent the summer of 2026 headlining festivals, among them Lollapalooza in Chicago, where the word Housewife flashed on the screens at the start of her set without anyone noticing, as she later told Jimmy Fallon. On October 1 she launched her first fragrance, Tate 01. Two weeks later RCA released Housewife, the lead single from her fourth album. The title is a joke at its own expense: the cover shows her in a red bikini pushing a pram stuffed with dollar bills, and the chorus asks to “make a lot of money, be my own housewife”. On The Tonight Show she described it as a song “about a woman who can’t be contained”. Three days after its release she sang it in public for the first time at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, with Gigi Hadid joining her on the catwalk, and RCA issued that performance as a live single on October 21. Housewife gave her a first number one in Australia.

Her personal life has stayed mostly offstage. She dated the Australian singer the Kid Laroi from 2024 until July 2025, and they recorded I Know Love together for So Close to What. She lives in New York.

The fourth album still has no title, no release date and no track list. Housewife settles its direction, which points away from the bedroom ballads that started her career and towards the stage where she first learned her craft. What it cannot settle yet is whether a full record of these songs holds up without the dancers behind her, and that question only the album can answer.