Compared with last year’s top-notch pop glut, 2025 has been a little quieter: while last year was defined by all things neon-green and Brat, we’re seemingly heading into this autumn without a singular, stand-out ‘song of the summer’. Still, Addison Rae has provided one of the lead contenders with Headphones On, a self-consciously restrained, whispery slab of low-key pop that channels mid-Nineties Madonna and Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope. Now, she’s midway through her first ever tour: and her pair of comically small shows at Brixton Academy are two of the hottest tickets of the summer.
From the moment she emerges from behind a pair of dramatically backlit iron gates, for opener Fame is a Gun, Rae doesn’t stop dancing. Singing into an Oops!... I Did It Again-coded headset mic, she throws her energy into a procession of choreo routines, switching between nods to ballet (Summer Forever) to pairing the relatively restrained High Fashion with the sort of split-popping, limb-flailing choreo chaos that feels more suited to a record like Brat.
As Rae energetically flings herself around the floor like an Australian Olympic breakdancer, contorting her body and popping speed-squats in the middle of the stage, the backing vocals keep things steadfast and whispery-cool.
While Rae’s music career originally got off to a rocky start with the cookie-cutter, inoffensively boring debut single Obsessed back in 2021, the wildly popular TikTokker-turned-pop-star hasn’t let a good old fashioned critical panning dissuade her. Instead, she dusted herself off, and enlisted emerging Swedish production duo Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd – signed to Max Martin’s production company – for her debut album, one of 2025’s lushest-sounding and most interesting pop releases. And far from rocking up at Brixton with intentions of winging it, Rae is clearly well-prepared to take on one of London’s better-known venues as a live show rookie.
She also avoids over-stretching her currently quite limited musical repertoire, just for the sake of it. Instead, she gives us a short and sharp 45 minutes of pure pop, minus an encore, and sans support act.
Many of pop’s recent left-field successes have poked fun at Noughties pop tropes and channeled the enormous influence of PC Music, largely helmed by younger Millennials and Gen-Z-cuspers who grew up with heavily-manicured artists like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, and remember their flawless personas from the first time around. With this in mind, it’s interesting to see the next gen resurrecting similarly polished aesthetics, seemingly without a shred of irony.
Throughout, the packed venue doesn’t stop screaming for Rae, and I swear the building even vibrated a bit during the shrieking breakdown of her Charli XCX collab Von Dutch (Rae’s feature-spot on the A.G. Cook remix was arguably her breakthrough moment).
“I thought it couldn’t get louder than Manchester!” she remarks. “Maybe I was wrong!” And by the time closer Diet Pepsi came around, London had surely secured the trophy on that front.
