Reneé Rapp has drastically switched up her game since her excellent 2023 debut Snow Angel — and it’s a glorious noise to hear. She spends her second album Bite Me enjoying what a rowdy-and-proud mess she is, for one of the year’s most delightful pop blowouts, an uproarious 33-minute celebration of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. It’s her first album since coming out, and damn, she’s making up for lost time, with bangers full of Hollywood parties and thirsty groupies and hangovers and the mad dash to the next club. It’s a concept album where the concept is “If I can’t be happy, then at least I’m hot.”
“She asked me how I like my breakfast/I told her ‘hot on the bedroom floor’” — that’s a pretty typical conversation on this album, from the hell-raising rocker “Kiss It Kiss It.” But as she shrugs later in the same song, “Talking is boring,” and that’s the last thing she wants to be on Bite Me.
Rapp broke out as an actress, in the Broadway show Mean Girls and HBO Max’s The Sex Lives of College Girls, but now she dismisses her actorly past with the kiss-off, “I took my sex life with me, now that show ain’t fuckin.’” She was so demure and forlorn by comparison on Snow Angel, which had wonderfully heartbroken confessions like “I Hate Boston,” one of the very best Boston-hating songs ever written. But that was a short ingenue era, because Bite Me is a lot less melancholy than Snow Angel, to say the least. These days, she’s living the hedonistic high life in L.A., just young, rich, and tasteless.
Bite Me gets production mainly from Omer Jedi, along with other heavy hitters like Alexander 23 (who executive-produced her debut), Ryan Tedder, Julian Bunetta, Carter Lang, and more. The rock moves are straight-up Nineties grunge — like so many of today’s brightest pop queens, Reneé aspires to make her own L7, Hole, and Garbage bangers. Party-hearty anthems like “Leave Me Alone” hit like old-school Sunset Strip rock sleaze updated for the sapphic pop explosion of our moment — as if David Lee Roth or Bret Michaels got reborn as Gen Z lesbian icons.
Hell, she doesn’t even make it out of the first verse of the opening song before she’s rhyming “Wear my jeans so low, I show my little back dimples” with “Even line my lips just to match my nipples.” It takes her all the way to the end of the song to end up in bed with a couple of her exes — “the three of us together, that’s a real tongue-twister” — and that’s honestly one of the album’s longest celibate stretches.
Practically every song explodes with one-liners that demand to be quoted, from “Don’t handle me with care when you’re pulling my hair” to “Funny, because it didn’t feel like ‘friends’ on the kitchen floor.” “At Least I’m Hot” is a Seventies disco tribute featuring a cameo from her real-life guitar-hero girlfriend Towa Bird, as they chitchat their flirtatious banter in the studio. This power couple’s sensibilities match each other perfectly; they’re basically the Cher and Greg Allman for a whole new era of Hollywood rock-star debauchery.
“I’m just a little bit shy,” Reneé claims in “Shy,” a slightly dubious-sounding confession in a rocker where she chants, “Come on and cross my heart and hope to die/I’m thinking somewhere in between your thighs.” As on the rest of Bite Me, she doesn’t sound like she’s anywhere near shy’s area code. “I’m violent when I’m drinking,” she boasts. “I’m violent when I’m sober, too/I’m useful in a bar fight/But my hands work differently on you.”
“Good Girl” is Eighties-style synth-pop, not a long way off from Stacey Q’s unjustly forgotten 1988 mall-disco classic “Good Girl.” Rapp remembers how she used to be such a responsible adult (“sunsets and yoga, safe sex and no drugs”), ready to leave the party early and get a healthy night’s sleep, until she loses her mind over the baddie across the room with the lip tattoo.
She takes on relationship melodrama in “Why Is She Still Here?,” “I Can’t Have You Around Me,” and “Mad,” grousing, “All the time you wasted being mad/We could have been cute and we could have been stupid…we could have been having sex.” In “You’d Like That Wouldn’t You,” she gloats over how easy it would be to snag her ex back (“If I drive out to your spot/And my tits spilled out of my cherry top/And apologized for a lot”), promising, “I swear that I would never ever ever cheat…again.” But no matter how much she misses this ex, she admits, “The thought of getting back together makes me wanna die alone.”
The piano ballad “That’s So Funny” addresses a femme fatale — the same ex that she skewered on her debut in “Poison Poison” — except this time she brings a more playful sense of vengeance. “Now everyone hates you except for my lawyer,” she sings, noting, “If you’re looking for closure, you got a better shot with God than you do with me.” But it’s an a change of pace on an album that usually doesn’t slow down long enough for sad songs. On Bite Me, she isn’t here to express regrets or mourn the past — instead, she’s out to party her troubles away. And against a force of nature like Reneé Rapp, her troubles don’t stand a chance.
