Reneé Rapp
Bite Me
INTERSCOPE
The head-charging, angst-laden, power-sung, anti-romantic, candy-coated pop of Reneé Rapp’s sophomore album has likely more to do with playing the antagonistic lead in 2024’s musical film version of Mean Girls (whose Broadway iteration she debuted her Regina George role in beginning in 2018) than it does any real attitudinal and aesthetic progression from her debut album from 2023, Snow Angel. A stage-and-screen kid forever, Rapp’s big voice, actorly prowess, and busted-up lyrical throughline on Bite Me is surely meant to portray her as a brat with balls, a young queer woman with acting chops to convince most that the choppy, Sapphic-punkish pop of “Leave Me Alone” and the curt, self-reproaching snipe of “Mad” burrow deep into her soul.
Which is great; selling a song is selling a song, and whoever buys it, gets it. Still, there must be a buyers-beware remorse in the morose balladry of “That’s So Funny” and “Why Is She Still Here?,” or the Erasure-lite of “Good Girl.” All of this is not to say that there’s nothing to like on Bite Me—Rapp’s Ryan Tedder co-write “Sometimes” is catchy and happily tentative, while “I Can’t Have You Around Me Anymore” could be the summer of 2025’s sunshiny, folksy, will-we-or-won’t-we hit and the aforementioned “Leave Me Alone” is undoubtedly addictive. Then again, so is sugar.
