The "Simple Pop" formula

Learning to love: Tate McRae

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That feeling when an AI chatbot spits out something technically perfect but feels a bit... off? That's the sound of Tate McRae's music. With "greedy" and "you broke me first" each surpassing 1.5 billion streams, she's undeniably one of pop's biggest new stars. But there's something about her songs that feels almost too perfect, like someone fed the last 20 years of pop music into an algorithm and asked it to create guaranteed hits.

But listen closer and something fascinating emerges in McRae's music. She's mastered what we'll call "SimplePop," a formula that explains why her songs get stuck in your head even when you're trying to resist them.

"Exes" offers the perfect case study of the Simple Pop formula. The first element is the is her lack of discernible personality. McRae's vocal delivery is intentionally non-distinct, letting listeners easily project themselves into her songs. Then there's the "dangling hooks" approach (credit to producer Ryan Tedder). Instead of saving the catchiest parts for the chorus, McRae's songs scatter earworms throughout. The song begins with the post-chorus. What!?

The third piece of the Simple Pop puzzle is "vibe snatching." McRae uses a vocal rhythm that Adam Neely calls the "scotch snap," a short stressed syllable followed by a longer unstressed one. While this pattern has roots in Scottish music (hence the name), it became a signature sound of 2010s hip hop. Listen for it in Cardi B's "I Like It," Beyoncé's "Drunk in Love," and now it's everywhere in pop music.

And then there is the production that sounds like a beat snatched out of 2002. That Middle Eastern-influenced production in the pre-chorus isn't coming out of nowhere, it's drawing from the Timbaland playbook of the 2000s. We’re talking “Get Ur Freak On.” This isn't random copying either. There's a direct lineage: Tedder, McRae's producer, was actually mentored by Timbaland. Often pop music operates like a game of telephone, passing sounds from generation to generation.

This matters because instead of dismissing McRae as just another pop clone, we should understand her as part of pop's necessary ecosystem. Think of her less as the next Britney Spears and more as this generation's Paula Abdul: a dancer-turned-singer who understands that sometimes what pop music needs isn't revolution but really good refinement.

The Simple Pop formula might not push boundaries, but it gives listeners exactly what they want: incredibly catchy, danceable tracks that feel both fresh and familiar. Not everyone can innovate, some artists need to refine a sound to give DJs enough genre material to fill a set. In trying to resist Tate McRae's music, it's easy to miss what makes it work so well. Sometimes the pop star you're trying not to like turns out to be exactly the one pop music needs.