The 2020s File Feature
Exes
Exes: Tate McRae and the Pop Moment That Proved Her Staying PowerFrom Edmonton to the Global ConversationTate McRae's rise through the early 2020s followed a…
01 The Story
Exes: Tate McRae and the Pop Moment That Proved Her Staying Power
From Edmonton to the Global Conversation
Tate McRae's rise through the early 2020s followed a trajectory that had become newly possible in the streaming era: an emotionally direct voice, sharp movement ability from her dance background, and a songwriting sensibility that landed somewhere between confessional pop and danceable alt-R&B. By late 2023, she had already proven herself capable of genuine commercial breakthroughs; her 2022 single She's All I Wanna Be had been a global streaming phenomenon. When Exes arrived in December 2023, it hit a Hot 100 already crowded with year-end competition and carved out a significant position anyway.
The Sound of Being 21 and Over It
What Exes does sonically is interesting: it takes the emotional vocabulary of post-breakup reckoning and packages it in production that does not feel sorry for itself. The track has a propulsive quality, a groove that sits somewhere between pop and contemporary R&B, and McRae's delivery carries the controlled intensity she had been developing across her earlier releases. She does not sound devastated on this record; she sounds clear-eyed and mobile, like someone who has processed the thing and is now moving through the world with the knowledge it gave her. That emotional register — not hurt, not healed, but somewhere more interesting in between — resonated with a specific demographic of listeners who recognized it immediately.
A Strong Debut and a Twenty-Week Run
The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 2, 2023, entering at position 34. That debut placement was a genuine statement of commercial force: a top-35 entry in the most competitive chart window of the calendar year, when holiday releases and major album rollouts compete for positions simultaneously. Exes spent 20 weeks on the Hot 100, maintaining consistent streaming throughout the holiday season and into the new year. The YouTube presence accumulated to 59 million views, pointing to strong visual engagement with the song that extended well past the initial chart cycle.
Where McRae Was Heading
The release of Exes came just ahead of her album Think Later, and the two together functioned as a single statement: this was an artist who had moved past the earnest vulnerability of her early work into a more assured, and arguably more interesting, artistic position. The album's themes of complicated post-relationship psychology gave Exes context that deepened over repeat listening. For critics who had been tracking her development, the record felt like confirmation that the earlier commercial success was not a ceiling but a floor. For new listeners, it was simply an excellent pop song that went down easily and left residue.
The Generation She's Speaking For
McRae is one of a cohort of young artists born in the early 2000s who grew up consuming pop music through phones rather than through radio or MTV, and whose songwriting reflects that formation. The emotional directness, the refusal to dramatize in the ways that preceding generations of pop artists did, the comfort with ambiguity: these qualities mark a generational signature that Exes carries clearly. Press play and you will understand immediately why it arrived so high on the chart during one of the year's most crowded weeks.
“Exes” — Tate McRae's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Exes: Post-Relationship Clarity, Ambivalence, and What the Song Is Really Processing
The State Between Hurt and Fine
The emotional situation that Exes maps is specific in a way that makes it broadly relatable. McRae's narrator is not in the acute phase of heartbreak; she is past that, or at least past the sharpest of it. What she is navigating is the more complicated aftermath: the way someone you used to be with still occupies mental real estate, the specific awkwardness of encounter after the relationship has ended, the question of what you are allowed to feel now that the obvious feelings have subsided. This is a territory that popular music often skips over in favor of either the initial pain or the triumphant recovery, and Exes is more interested in the messy middle.
The Language of the Situationship Generation
Part of what gives the song its generational specificity is its fluency in the emotional vocabulary that young listeners in the early 2020s had developed for their romantic lives. The concepts of "situationships," of relationships that existed in the space between dating and not-dating, of entanglements that acquired no clean label and therefore had no clean ending: all of this context hovers over Exes even when it is not made explicit. The song is partly about the difficulty of categorizing what you had with someone and therefore the difficulty of categorizing what you are now.
Movement as a Metaphor
Tate McRae's background as a competitive dancer inflects her songwriting in subtle ways. There is a kinetic quality to how Exes handles its subject: the narrator does not stand still and contemplate; she moves through situations, through encounters, through the various emotional states the aftermath of a relationship generates. The song's production mirrors this: it keeps moving, resisting the temptation to slow down into a piano-and-voice confession. The emotional content is processed in motion, which feels true to the experience of someone young enough not to have developed a taste for sitting still with feelings.
Ambivalence as Honesty
The song's refusal to resolve into a clear emotional position is, paradoxically, what makes it feel most honest. She is not over it; she is not consumed by it. She knows something is still there; she is not sure she wants to do anything about it. That ambivalence is the actual texture of how complicated relationships end for most people, and it is far more truthfully rendered here than in the genre's tendency toward either devastation or triumphant closure. Listeners recognized it because it was accurate, not because it told them what they wanted to hear.
The Album as Full Picture
Within the context of Think Later, Exes functions as part of a larger emotional portrait. The album's themes of self-interrogation and complicated feeling give the song additional dimensions: you hear it differently knowing what surrounds it. For listeners who came to McRae through Exes first, working backward through the album sheds light on what she was working through in this specific track. The song holds up independently, but it also rewards the deeper dive that any genuinely good album invites.
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