Fresh off a headline performance at Montréal's Osheaga Festival, Tate McRae is turning her attention to the next chapter of her career.
The Calgary-born pop star has revealed in an interview with Variety that work is already underway on her fourth studio album following the massive success of So Close to What. While the project is still in its early stages, McRae says she's embracing experimentation rather than rushing toward a finished concept.
Her first writing session took place in February with songwriters Amy Allen and Emile Haynie. Like her previous albums, the new record is beginning with mood boards and visual references before the music fully takes shape. McRae also says she's been drawing inspiration from a Dolly Parton coffee-table book filled with handwritten lyrics, while deliberately avoiding current pop music during the writing process to keep her ideas fresh.
The update comes just days after McRae returned to Canada for one of the most significant performances of her career. Before taking the stage at Osheaga, she described the Montréal festival as a particularly meaningful milestone, noting that it would mark her first appearance at a Canadian music festival despite becoming one of the country's biggest international stars.
"A lot is riding on Osheaga," she said ahead of the performance, explaining that returning home carried a different kind of pressure than any other stop on her schedule, and she saw it as an opportunity to push herself creatively and continue raising the bar with every performance. “There’s always thought about how you want your legacy to go down,” she told the publication. “For me, the way to do that is try to beat your last performance, try to beat your last song, try to grow, evolve, pick it apart, rip it apart, figure out what didn’t work, what I didn’t like about that performance, what I could have done better, why I was nervous, figure out how to not be nervous. I think the more you can master yourself and your performances, the better you get.”
Although she now lives in New York, McRae says Canada remains at the center of her life. She still returns home several times a year to see her family, speaks with her mother multiple times a day and continues to carry her Canadian identity with her as she prepares for what promises to be another pivotal era.
.png)
Those small opportunities became part of the festival’s identity: a place where established acts and future stars could exist side by side. That philosophy remains central to the festival’s return. While Warped Tour’s biggest names will draw crowds, Lyman believes the real magic has always happened away from the main stages.