Tate McRae has had to shift her mentality around her new album, So Close to What, after several of the songs’ demos leaked online. During a Spotify event Tuesday night, the pop star opened up about being “devastated” after her songs leaked earlier this year.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the album got leaked, which was a fucking bummer,” she said. “And I think obviously that makes you look at the project differently… I was just so devastated because I’m like, ‘There’s nothing I can do about this. The whole project is online.’”
“From my problem-solving brain, I was just like, there’s nothing I can do now,” she added. “And all I did was just go to the studio to write a couple more songs. I wrote a song called ‘Like I Do’ and ‘Bloodonmyhands’ and just [tried] to grab as much control back as I could in that kind of situation.”
McRae shared that her music typically goes through so many rounds of mixes and production changes that ultimately change how the songs sound when finalized. Hence, the music many fans heard online was far from the end project she expected to release.
“There’s a few lyrics that you put down and you’re like ‘Never mind, I’m not gonna release that. I need to change this,’” she said. “You do all this finessing in the last second. And that’s such a beautiful part of the process. And I think without that, it’s really stressful.”
“The demo never sounds how you want it to sound. There’s so much missing,” she added. “And yeah, at that point I was just like, Ah, they’re not done or how I want them. And that was hard.”
McRae poked fun at the music leak when she started teasing “Sports Car,” captioning a snippet: “U forgot to leak this.” The pop star is expected to release her album So Close to What on Friday, featuring singles “2 Hands” and “It’s OK I’m OK,” along with collaborations with her boyfriend The Kid Laroi, and rap star Flo Milli.
“I love Flo Milli’s tone of voice, and this is my first-ever Miami bass record… This was the last song that I added to the album. I wrote this in New York, and I just had a second verse,” McRae said. “I was like, we should get a rapper on this and then Flo wrote it. aweek later. It is crazy. It literally got turned in two weeks ago.”
