“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.”
