From the outside, it appeared that the 25-year-old actor turned singer was living her best life the past few years: releasing her debut album Snow Angel in 2023, starring as Regina George in the 2024 Mean Girls musical, making her 2024 Coachella debut with a surprise appearance from Kesha. But the way Reneé Rapp tells it, her life was privately a mess. “I think you’re at constant war with yourself, and you’re in constant competition with you and the best version of you,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “You are constantly feeling like you need to be doing more, like you need to be working harder, like you are not good enough, like you are just at the mercy of everyone and everything around you—and you are.” In search of what had made her fall in love with music in the first place, Rapp pulled a hard reset: undergoing ketamine therapy, going off her birth control, disregarding the advice of guys who sit in boardrooms. The result is BITE ME, her second full-length album, and her most personal. Open-hearted ballads about relationships in all their messy drama (“Why Is She Still Here?”) are countered by devil-may-care disco jams about 40-hour one-night stands (“Kiss It Kiss It”). “Can I tell you a secret? I’m so sick of it all,” Rapp purrs on the joyfully sleazy “Leave Me Alone,” before throwing caution to the wind: “Come get wet in the deep end/T-t-t-take it off/C-c-c-cannonball!” (She also fires a not-so-subtle shot at the series she once starred in, The Sex Lives of College Girls.) “I set out to impress myself,” she tells Lowe. “I set out to make music I would want to listen to, and I set out to not compromise a single thing about my personality and be unwaveringly loud about it—and I did that.” Somewhere in BITE ME’s reckless abandon, Rapp found a sense of peace. “This album to me feels like ripping off all of your clothes, stripping naked and running down a street after you’ve been violently crying,” she says. “And you’re almost laughing because you’re like, ‘I’m done with this. I’m sick of this. I’m not letting this hold me.’”