Reneé Rapp, the actress and singer who has appeared on The Sex Lives of College Girls and in the Broadway musicals Spring Awakening and Mean Girls, will release her long-awaited first full-length album, Snow Angel, on Aug. 18. She’ll be releasing the record’s first single, also called “Snow Angel,” on Friday.
The album, which follows last year’s Everything to Everyone EP, originally had a different title and thrust but Rapp explained on Twitter that she decided to change directions last month. “My album was done,” she wrote. “I had all the songs. I even had the lead single picked out, too. I spent four months writing nearly every day. I spit out all my concepts, all my ballads, my fuck you’s and my I love you’s. We rented out studios in Jersey while I was filming Mean Girls and cried in damn near every studio in the Valley.”
Things changed on May 8, she wrote, when she and producer Alexander 23 were attempting to finish vocals. That night, she realized she was still processing a difficult time in her life. “A little over a year ago I had a traumatic experience,” she wrote without disclosing the trauma. “I don’t love to throw that word around lightly, so I understand the weight it holds. My last week in Jersey, I texted Alexander that I wanted to write about it when I got home.
“I explained and recounted the situation in sessions with collaborators, but it just wasn’t sticking,” she continued. “Then, that night, May 8th, he told me, ‘I really want to write that ‘snow’ song. I think it’s good, really good.’ So, we stayed up. We wrote it that night and recorded it the next day.” They submitted the track to her team on May 15, leading her manager to tell her to stop production on the previously agreed-upon single. “[The] other single was out, ‘Snow Angel’ was in,” she wrote. “They believed in the song as much as I did … That meant everything.”
She went on to say that she feels both proud and scared about releasing the song. “I’m very sarcastic and I make a lot of jokes, but this one is fucking different,” she wrote. “This was all supposed to happen this way, and this was the song you were supposed to hear first.”
Rapp released Everything to Everyone last November, and the EP’s single, “Too Well,” became a hit, charting in the Top 40 on Billboard’s pop airplay chart. In addition to acting in College Girls, Rapp has been filming Mean Girls: The Musical, in which she appears as Plastics leader Regina George.
Last year, Rapp told Rolling Stone that she hopes people will accept her as a musician on her own outside of her acting roles. “Music is the way I communicate, the way that I feel heard,” she said. “And so I just really fucking hope that people love it as much as I do because I care about it more than I probably care about anything in the world, even my wellbeing.”