Thunderous approval for pop star Tate McRae at Canada Life Centre

Even if you think you’ve never heard of Tate McRae, you’ve definitely heard Tate McRae.

The 22-year-old Calgary-born pop star is having a supernova moment. Her 2023 single Greedy continues to have a chokehold on pop radio. She is one of the Top 50 most-listened-to artists in the world on Spotify. She has had 21 (!) songs chart on the Billboard Top 100.

People might know her better — or at least first — as a dancer. McRae also has the distinction of being the first Canadian finalist on the American reality series So You Think You Can Dance. She started posting songs to YouTube in 2019 and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now, McRae’s out on her three-continent Miss Possessive Tour — in support of her third album, this year’s So Close To What — which brought her to Canada Life Centre on Saturday night.

Starting with plenty of pyro and smoke right out of the gate, McRae let the anticipation build before taking the stage in a teeny white outfit for a slinky, sexy performance of Miss Possessive, flanked by a crew of impressive dancers.

For an arena pop show, the stage set up was surprisingly spartan: a large T-shaped catwalk with a circular B stage, backed by three giant screens that had a few video interstitials but mostly showed what was going on onstage (her videographers were absolutely excellent). This allowed McRae to be the focus — her face, her voice, her choreography. And her hairography, of course; McRae’s honey-coloured mane is a main character, and she loves an expertly-timed hair flip.

McRae draws a lot of comparisons to Britney Spears, perhaps because she’s a pop star who can actually dance and perhaps because, like Spears, McRae’s also big into the breathy baby voice, or so-called cursive singing — a term that describes a vocal style in which certain vowels are elongated while the consonants are clipped. (It gets its name because it sounds like cursive writing.)

Both qualities were on full display on Saturday night, though her vocals had far more power behind them live than their recorded counterparts might suggest, especially on Siren Sounds, for which she commanded the stage.

The show mostly felt like a relentlessly paced, 95-minute Y2K-era music video: a lot of crawling around the stage on all-fours, plenty of head snaps, a full-on stripper pole for the R&B-inflected Uh Oh.

But she offered glimpses of her other sides as an artist, too, taking the mic on the B-stage in a black gown for performances of Greenlight and a soaring Nostalgia before sitting down at a keyboard for a little medley that threw back to her YouTube days.

A note here on the crowd: I don’t think even the Winnipeg Whiteout games got this loud.

The energy ramped back up before the show ended with a bang: an explosive rendition of Just Keep Watching, followed by the definitely Britney-indebted Sports Car (which featured a waterfall of sparks) and, of course, Greedy.

A lot of culture critics (especially Elder Millennial ones) have spent the past couple of years dedicating a lot of pixels and podcast air to parsing the “why” of McRae’s fame. For my part, I think it simply comes down to the idea that not everything is for everyone, and that’s fine. She’s part of a rich tradition of generic pop music that people like because they can dance and sing along to it. Don’t overthink it.

Swedish pop star Zara Larsson opened the show with a set stepped in clubby early-aughts dance pop — right down to a cover of Britney Spears’ Gimme More that gives the original a run for its money.

But as a vocalist, Larsson evokes Christina Aguilera more than Britney. She’s got a big, acrobatic voice, which was given a workout on the 2015 banger Lush Life and this year’s Midnight Sun, the title track from her forthcoming fifth studio album, due out in September. The latter is a sweet ode to Sweden’s long summer days, but it’s also yet more proof that the Swedes sure know how to write a pop song.

Larsson closed with her titanic 2017 hit Symphony, which had big headliner energy.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca