“Leave me alone, bitch/ I wanna have fun!” runs the cheerleader chant of “Leave Me Alone”, the lead single from Reneé Rapp’s second album, Bite Me. Recalling the winkingly naughty, early-Noughties ’tude of Pink, she uses the lyrics of the record’s mission statement to flip off industry demands for new songs.
It’s perfectly on-brand. Gleefully unfiltered, 25-year-old Rapp has exploded into pop culture like a confetti cannon. Best known for eating up the role of high school queen bee Regina George in the musical adaptation of Mean Girls – on Broadway for a year in 2019 and then in the 2024 film – the North Carolina star impressed music critics with her emotionally frank pop debut Snow Angel (2023). She stole a few more hearts on the small screen as (initially closeted) wealthy lesbian Leighton in HBO’s bluntly joyful comedy drama The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021-2024). But her USP is surely her unapologetically off-message behaviour in interviews, which gets compiled into YouTube videos with titles such as “Reneé Rapp making her PR team question their life choices” and “Reneé Rapp being everyone’s intrusive thoughts”. She owns the joke well on “Leave Me Alone” with the line: “Sign a hundred NDAs but I still say something.”
The punk-edged party pop sound of Bite Me doesn’t quite live up to the distinctive blast of Rapp’s personality. You could imagine many of the 12 tracks here – which often combine wrathful or moody rock guitars with Eighties synth pulses and moments of roared vocal dropping to snarky purrs – being delivered by Olivia Rodrigo. But the multicredited melodies are solid enough to support the strength of Rapp’s defiant spirit and the giddy relish she throws into her explicitly queer narratives.
She revels in the steaminess of “Kiss It Kiss It”, which builds from a sloshy electric guitar quote from Garbage’s 1996 hit “Stupid Girl”, to a climax where Rapp exclaims: “I think we almost made a baby/ I mean, we can’t but… goddamn!” There’s a sultry seduction (and a sly nod back to the temptress synths of Kim Carnes) to the power ballad “Good Girl”, on which the singer struggles to resist the charms of a woman who disrupts her plans to “have just one drink and leave like a grown-up”.
There’s more melancholy to her decision to resist infidelity on “I Can’t Have You Around Me Anymore”, finding her way into the awkward corners of the messy emotion. Rapp has said in interviews that having trained to belt out songs stage-school style, she struggles with moments of more intimate vocal subtlety. But she plays with that well on “That’s So Funny”, delivering a sequence of cartoon-tonsil-clanging declarations of “I love you!” before dropping that to lament “took my my love twisted it to a f*** you”.
Like Rodrigo, Rapp is often at her best when she’s on the attack, clapping back at the haters and eviscerating her exes. Over the gnarly guitar churn of “Mad”, she eye-rolls an argumentative lover with the blunt delivery of: “All of the time you wasted being mad … could’ve been getting head!” To the fretful strum of “You’d Like That Wouldn’t U”, she conjures a series of fantasy scenarios for an ex, only to assure her they’ll never come true. “If I drive to your spot and my tits spilled out of my cherry top/ And apologised for a lot, would you like that?” she teases before concluding that “the thought of gettin’ back together makes me wanna die alone”. Meanwhile, you can almost hear her tossing her hair as she bops to the breezy, beach bar disco of “At Least I’m Hot”.
If Bite Me isn’t the consistently massive deal Mean Girls fans might have hoped for, it’s still pretty fetch.
