What the song is about
The car is a metaphor, and unusually for this kind of question there is no need to guess at what for. McRae has described the song as being about the adrenaline of love and sex and the excitement of it — the idea that the feeling of desire in a relationship maps directly onto the sensation of a sports car.
The feeling of sex and love in a relationship can directly correlate to a sports car — Tate McRae
That is the whole conceit, and the lyric commits to it. Speed, control, handling and who is driving all do double duty, and the song stays inside the metaphor rather than stepping outside to explain itself. The result is a seduction record built on a single sustained image.
It is worth being clear about what the song is not, because the title invites a reading it does not support. This is not a song about wanting to drive away from somewhere, and it is not about youthful escapism or nostalgia. Nothing in it is wistful. The energy is confident and present-tense throughout.
Written with Tedder and Michaels
"Sports car" was released on 24 January 2025 through RCA Records as the third single from McRae's third studio album, So Close to What.
It was co-written by McRae with Julia Michaels, Ryan Tedder and Grant Boutin, and produced by Tedder and Boutin. That is a notably pop-craft-heavy room — Michaels is among the most successful topliners of the last decade, Tedder among its most prolific producers — and the record has the finish you would expect from it.
The album context matters. So Close to What was announced in November 2024 and became McRae's first album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, also topping the charts in Australia, Austria and Canada. "Sports car" was one of the singles that carried it there.
Why it sounds like 2004
The track is pop and dance-pop, runs 2:46, and is deliberately retrospective. Critics repeatedly reached for the same comparisons on release: early-2000s dance-pop, Britney Spears, and specifically the Pussycat Dolls' "Buttons" from 2006.
Those comparisons are earned by the arrangement rather than by pastiche. The song is built on a dark, tightly-sprung groove with a lot of empty space in it, and the melody sits in a narrow range and leans on rhythm rather than reach. It is written in A, using a Phrygian dominant scale, which is where the slightly coiled, non-Western colour of the hook comes from and a large part of why it does not sound like standard contemporary pop.
McRae's vocal is close and mostly restrained, delivered in a near-whisper for long stretches. The restraint is the point: a song about desire performed at full volume would be a different and much less effective record.
Chart performance
"Sports car" debuted at No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 — at the time her second-highest chart debut — and climbed to a peak of No. 16.
It performed better still elsewhere, reaching No. 3 in the UK and No. 9 in Canada, with top-ten peaks in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Bulgaria, Colombia, Guatemala, Kazakhstan, Romania and Russia.
It has since been certified multi-platinum in numerous territories, including 4× Platinum in Australia and Canada and 2× Platinum in the United States.
Bardia Zeinali's twelve looks
The video, directed by Bardia Zeinali, was released the same day as the single. It is structured as a sequence of costume changes — twelve outfits in all, among them a Roberto Cavalli cheetah-print corset — staged in a peep-show-inspired setting.
Directed by Bardia Zeinali, 2025 — twelve outfits, one set.
The structure is doing something more than showing clothes. By cycling McRae through a run of distinct pop-star aesthetics in a few minutes, the video makes the song's early-2000s borrowings explicit and treats them as costume rather than as sincerity — which is a defensible way to revive a sound without pretending you invented it.
SNL and the VMAs
McRae performed the song on her Saturday Night Live debut on 1 March 2025.
She returned to it at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 2025, in a medley with "Revolving Door". The choreography for that performance, by Robbie Blue, earned an Emmy nomination — a reminder that McRae trained as a competitive dancer, and that the physical performance of these songs is not incidental to them.
The lyrics
The lyric sustains one metaphor from start to finish and never breaks character. Its vocabulary is almost entirely automotive — speed, handling, control, who has the keys — and every term is doing second duty. There is no verse in which the song explains the comparison, which is why it works: the listener is trusted to have understood it from the title.
The writing is also structurally efficient. At under three minutes there is no bridge-and-key-change payoff; the song simply establishes its groove, states its case and stops.