In the music industry, the term “hiatus” has historically been used to describe artists who take extended breaks between releases. Most often, they do so in the name of creative restoration — and to their fans’ chagrin.
Such dry spells have marked singer-songwriters like Fiona Apple and Lorde, who throughout their careers have sustained several years-long periods of radio silence between albums.
Hence why Reneé Rapp was perplexed when, after going less than two years without releasing new solo music, people started saying she was on hiatus.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, after her break,’ and I’m like, ‘You mean doing festivals every other weekend? And making an album during it?’” Rapp said on a Zoom call in early October.
An hour or so later, the artist would head to sound check at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio, where — despite a fever she was currently downing antibiotics to temper — she’d be playing later that night in support of her Bite Me Tour.
“It’s whatever, I’ve performed through worse,” Rapp said, recalling a Christmas Eve show she’d pushed through despite a bout of food poisoning.
In the years since her widely praised Broadway run as “Mean Girls” villain Regina George, which she embarked on when she was just 19, Rapp has had a stint in television, reprised her role as North Shore High School’s apex predator for a movie musical adaptation of “Mean Girls” and released and toured an EP and two albums’ worth of music.
Rapp’s debut album, “Snow Angel,” arrived to much fanfare in 2023, and her sophomore record, “Bite Me,” dropped in August. The next month, she kicked off her Bite Me Tour, which lands at the Kia Forum on Friday.
“I can listen back to every song and be like, ‘Oh, that’s good,’” Reneé Rapp said of her new album “Bite Me.”
(Ashley Thompson / Respective Collective)
In other words, Rapp has been busy.
And as for her alleged hiatus, the singer said, “The only real break that I took was saying, ‘No, I don’t want to just put out music to put out music.’”
It’s not that she didn’t have any songs written; she just didn’t believe in any of them strongly enough to release them. Some, she’s still sitting on.
But the 12 tracks that make up “Bite Me,” Rapp said she chose purposefully: “I wanted to write, like, mathematically, a good pop album.”
“[‘Snow Angel’] was like, ‘OK, here’s a T-shirt and a long sleeve and jeans and sweatpants. And they’re not folded, but here you go. They’re all good pieces of clothing,’” the artist said.
“This album is like all of those clothes, but laundered and folded neat and perfectly wrapped in a bow,” she said.
Ranging sonically from glam punk to synth pop and post-disco melodies, “Bite Me” is a vocally rich and charmingly diaristic record that hits like a wine-drunk dream. Like Rapp herself, it swings between emotional extremes, always preserving the singer’s trademark candor. As she quips on her splashy lead single “Leave Me Alone,” she’ll “sign a hundred NDAs, but I still say somethin.’”
“Bite Me” topped Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart, moving 47,000 copies — 30,000 of which were vinyl purchases — in the U.S. in its first week. It also placed third on the overall Billboard 200, giving Rapp her first top 10 entry.
Upon its August release, Rapp described “Bite Me” as “a time capsule of the last two to three years of my life. Every part. The good bad and the ugly.”
But while the album is autobiographical in spirit, its songs also benefit from a leniency on Rapp’s part about her faithfulness to their source material. Some songs blend one of the singer’s life experiences with another, while others are deliberately disproportionate to such events.
“My line is, like, if I felt that way at one point, it can be true, even if it’s not true now,” Rapp said.
On her aching ballad “Why Is She Still Here?” Rapp plays the part of a lover embittered by the lingering presence of a third party in her relationship. The track could score a film noir sequence, its narrative betraying months of romantic turmoil.
In actuality, the song draws from “a three- or four-day period of my life that I blew up into this big thing,” Rapp said.
Reneé Rapp will play her biggest L.A. show yet at the Kia Forum.
(Respective Collective / Ashley Thompson)
Rapp’s close friend and frequent collaborator, singer-songwriter and producer Alexander Glantz (who goes by the stage name Alexander 23), has always known her to be a deeply sensitive and passionate person.
“Reneé just doesn’t feel things lightly,” Glantz said. “I’ve never heard of her talking about something lamely or with any type of subtlety. When she feels something, she feels at 100%.”
“As a producer and co-writer,” he continued, “it’s kind of my job to put that into music as best I can.”
Glantz, who is also credited on hits from Olivia Rodrigo and Tate McRae, recognized Rapp’s “star power” from the moment he met her. He also felt a strong “creative chemistry” between them, which has since developed into a close artistic partnership that at times veers into sibling rivalry.
The two clash constantly in the studio, with their ugliest spats known to derail recording days. They even argue about song titles. Despite Rapp dubbing her lead single “Cannonball” in her mind, Glantz along with “Bite Me” writer-producers Omer Fedi and Julian Bunetta insisted “Leave Me Alone” was the obvious choice.
In the end, Rapp was outnumbered. But she also has a knack for not letting anyone’s victories go to their head, Glantz said: “I never really win, because even if you get what you want, she makes you feel so bad about it that you wish you didn’t even get it.”
“We’re so close that it’s kind of just a magnifying glass on everything,” Glantz said. When things aren’t clicking, it’s torture, he said, but “when it’s good, it’s f— euphoric.”
The day they wrote “Mad” fell in the latter camp.
“We’d been circling the sound for months,” Glantz said, “and certainly we had some stuff we were excited about, but nothing felt like it was a true Trojan warrior of the album yet.”
But that day in Malibu, something clicked. Rapp’s vision was completely opened to them.
For Rapp, a public figure whose fans can’t help but form parasocial attachments to her, it’s a relief to feel so deeply understood. Try as she might in her songwriting, the artist said she can never explain herself in a way that will satisfy her listeners — or prevent them from coming to false conclusions about her.
“Sometimes I have to just be fine with people not understanding me or knowing me,” she said. Besides, “if I give everyone access to knowing every little part of me, then I don’t have anything left for myself.”
It’s a classic tale for artists, Glantz said. At first, the attention is thrilling, then it becomes claustrophobic.
“You start to be more out there and in the public eye,” the writer-producer said, “and I think the natural progression is you just get a little more protective.”
On Friday, Rapp will play her biggest L.A. show yet at the Kia Forum — a venue with nearly three times the capacity of the Greek Theatre, where she performed in 2023 in support of her Snow Hard Feelings Tour. During that run, singer-songwriter Towa Bird, now her girlfriend, was one of her openers. (Glantz was the other.)
“The only times I’ve ever played crowds this big are at festivals,” Rapp said, where audiences are there to see far more than just one performer, even if they’re the headliner.
“There is something specifically very electric about playing your own venues,” she said.
Like her album, Rapp’s Bite Me Tour set list is highly curated, with each song contributing to a sense of intensity and strength of will that emanates from “Bite Me.” Sustaining that energy throughout a set, especially when it’s in an arena, is demanding, Rapp said. It makes her miss the small acoustic shows that marked her early touring days.
But she’s rewarded with a deeper love for her songs that blossom in a live environment. “Good Girl,” especially, has grown on her.
Reneé Rapp brings her Bite Me Tour to the Kia Forum on Friday, Oct. 17.
(Respective Collective / Ashley Thompson)
Still, Rapp gets her greatest fulfillment as an artist not from climactic moments on stage but from the more intimate aspects of being a musician, like being in the studio, parsing her feelings alongside friends and distilling the mess into magic. Sometimes, she thinks she should take notes from her own favorite artists like Frank Ocean, who are content to stay reclusive and keep their work to themselves.
“But then other inspirations of mine put out a lot of music and have this big pop empire,” Rapp said. “I find myself getting really confused with, like, what do I actually want?”
Does she want to return to Broadway? Does she want to take another stab at Hollywood? Does she want to fall off the face of the earth for a while?
“I just want to make music at this point,” Rapp said, conclusively. Not a beat later, she changed her mind, as she’s wont to do.
“Actually, I take that back,” she said. “I want to do what the f— I want to do.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
