Northern Dial Artist Profile

Tate McRae

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Calgary-born singer-songwriter and dancer Tate McRae first built an audience through dance and self-released music online before the 2020 single "you broke me first" turned her into an international pop breakout. Her debut album i used to think i could fly kept much of that early confessional tone, framing heartbreak and insecurity in sparse, digitally native pop while her background as a high-level dancer remained a separate but increasingly important part of her performance identity.

McRae's second album THINK LATER marked a much bigger pop turn. The global hit "greedy" paired a harder rhythmic sound with choreography-forward visuals and helped move her from singer-songwriter breakout to arena-scale pop performer. At the 2024 JUNO Awards, "greedy" won Single of the Year and McRae won Artist of the Year. The following year, THINK LATER won both Album of the Year and Pop Album of the Year, "exes" won Single of the Year and McRae repeated as Artist of the Year.

That momentum accelerated with 2025's So Close To What, which became her first No. 1 album in both Canada and the United States. The record broadened her 2000s-informed pop palette through dance-pop, Miami bass and other club-oriented textures while putting her choreography more centrally into the way the songs were presented. By 2026, after another run of major chart records and her first GRAMMY nomination, McRae had become one of the clearest examples of a new Canadian pop generation in which songwriting, short-form discovery, high-level dance and large-scale visual performance are parts of the same career rather than separate lanes.