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veryone who worked on Jae Stephens’ debut album Audacity received a mandatory assignment: to watch Coyote Ugly. The 2000 film stars Piper Perabo as Violet, an aspiring songwriter with big city dreams and a gig at a bar that’s like a boot camp for building self-confidence. “She just wants to be a star,” Stephens says on a sweltering morning in New York. The cult classic connected with her as a kid growing up in Pasadena, but even more so as a woman with ambitious pop star aspirations of her own — and the nerve to go after them.
Stephens originally wanted to meet me at a dive bar to set the scene for Audacity, her album out Sept. 25. She’s watched Coyote Ugly more times than she can count, but as the record started taking shape, it was all she could see and hear.
“I felt like this was an album that sonically and thematically lived in that world,” Stephens says. “It feels like it’s in the city. It feels like it’s at night. It feels like it’s run by women. The men are literally only here as objects. Give me your money and leave. Like, this is not about you. I’m gonna auction you off to the highest bidder.”
There aren’t many spots in the city with rowdy crowds and sticky floors open at 10 in the morning, so we settle for coffee. Stephens arrives as if the plan remained intact, her head-to-toe leather look rebelling against the searing heat. In a few days, her dive bar dream will come true on the set of the music video for her magnetic new single, “Sugar Trap.” Her fictional bar is called Miss Andry’s, a play on misandry located at the intersection of not happening and think again. “Come on down to Miss Andry’s and get you a drink,” she says, giving her best sales pitch. “What else are you gonna get? Maybe not much.”
Stephens’ outfit in the video is a polished chastity belt layered over low-rise jeans and a black balconette bra branded with a scarlet letter. It’s an A is for Audacity, but also for autonomy in life and in love, amusing one-liners, and ascending to an elite level of pop success.
In 2024, Stephens inked a deal with Def Jam Recordings and Raedio, the music venture created by Issa Rae, which she was selected for through an emerging creators program in 2022. By then, Stephens had already landed songwriting placements with Ashanti, Jennifer Lopez, Ne-Yo, and more while working in sessions alongside producers like Hit-Boy, Rahki, and Brasstracks. Early in her career, she sporadically dropped songs on SoundCloud and Tumblr, then kind of forgot about them. Some were personal, others were pitches that didn’t land with other artists. When it came to her own releases, Stephens learned quickly that the role of a pop star is much more demanding.
“As a songwriter, your job ends when you leave the studio,” Stephens says. “With this, the job starts when the song is done.” For a while, she was passionate about creating music, but “it wasn’t something I was deeply intentional about or invested in.” It wasn’t the music she let slip, but the marketing and promotion required to stay top of mind for the audience she hoped to cultivate. Still, the attention accrued when she wasn’t looking. A track from her self-produced EP F**k It I’ll Do It Myself (2019) racked up millions of streams and she didn’t even notice. That same year, she performed alongside Khalid on Saturday Night Live. All the pieces were there, she just needed to step into the spotlight.
On Tumblr, Stephens ran a popular account under the handle BeyonceBeytwice. Her quick-witted sense of humor drove up her follower count throughout the 2010s. One of her best posts came in response to someone asking, “What does it mean when a guy says hi to you?” She replied with two words: “He’s lying.” The post has more than 287,000 notes. That same audience formed the foundation of her fanbase. The 29-year-old’s comedic edge is as present in conversation and online as it is in her songwriting, like when she takes a man to task on an Audacity deep cut that scolds, “Got arrested in Dallas with a negative balance, boy, what more do you have to lose?”
“I’ve always just had an audacious kind of spirit when I write,” Stephens says. “I feel like that’s the one place I’m allowed to be the villain. I’m allowed to say what I want, and the listener can decide if I’m serious or not.” She doesn’t prioritize turning her deepest thoughts into intensely personal songs. What’s fun to write, sing, and perform comes first, and the truth (or something resembling it) can come later. “I really value the process in that order,” she says. “I don’t want to prize the truth so much that the song is unlistenable.”
With Audacity, Stephens strikes a perfect balance. Produced by her close collaborator Dallas Caton, the record is full-blown maximalist pop. They were inspired by a comment on her single “Afterbody,” from her three-part EP series Sellout, that said it sounded like her producer used every sound on his computer. “Dallas, do more of that,” she told him. “Do even more of that.” If there was a moment when Stephens truly came into her own as a pop star, not just in her own eyes, but for the wider pop audience, too, it was “Afterbody.” It’s a foundational precursor for Audacity, which replicates its addictive pop earworm quality across every song. The beats are over the top, the writing is bold and direct, and Stephens is an alluring main character with a sharp tongue and an ear for dynamic pop and R&B melodies.
“A lot of the album is me trying to figure out: Am I the bad guy here? Am I wrong for wanting this, or should I really be willing to settle down a little bit now that I’m in this relationship?” She sets her standards high on “Expensive & Difficult,” and searches for someone who might be able to meet them on the new jack swing track “Crush.” She tries out the domesticated life on “I Miss the City,” the closest she gets to a true ballad, but makes a break for it by the end of the track. The song is connected to “The Distance,” where Stephens becomes something of an unreliable narrator. “‘I Miss the City’ is like, ‘He sucks and he’s controlling and he’s trying to keep me down and he’s bad and I’m leaving,’” she says. “And then ‘The Distance’ is the part where you’re like, oh, it sounds like you just don’t like him and you’re kind of a bitch.”
Sometimes being a bitch is the only way to get things done. Stephens has had to reinforce her boundaries and protect her independence in relationships as much as she has in her career. “I think people are quick to assume that I need hand-holding because I’m new to the major label system, but I’m not new to the industry,” says Stephens, referring to hovering A&Rs who might feel the need to insert themselves into her creative process. “Please leave. You don’t need to be here. I know how to write a song.”
“I’m trying to walk that line between being assertive, but also understanding that everybody is trying to do their job,” Stephens says. “There’s so many roadblocks in the way.” Post-Sellout she has been able to get her label to understand her vision a bit more. It hasn’t been without convincing. “You want to tell me that tweets don’t equal streams. Well, tweets equal ticket sales — half the people in this room are OOMF,” Stephens says, using the online shorthand for one of my followers. “It’s just been a thing of me proving that there’s a different way to do things, and I’m unafraid to shut people up in different ways.”
It’s a careful line to toe as a Black woman when being direct can so easily be read as being abrasive. Last year, Stephens launched the Sellout Podcast, where she welcomed artists like Jensen McRae, Flowerovlove, Hemlocke Springs, Alemeda, and more to candidly discuss their experiences in the music industry. “I learned that we’re all going through it,” she says. “No two journeys are the same, but as Black artists in our respective fields, we all have those moments of doubt — whether it’s self-inflicted or inflicted upon us by this ages-old industry that has always done things one way and is scared of a disruptor. I found a lot of solace in hearing how other people deal with it.”
Growing up online armed Stephens with an essential, if unconventional, skillset when it comes to marketing her music. One strategy in particular has worked fairly well: straight-up lying. “It did start with me, maybe a little bit,” Stephens says. “But it wasn’t lying. It was joking.” She crafted the fateful first lie on a plane in 2024, editing Barack Obama’s annual summer playlist to include her single “Wet.” Her fans took it from there. Last month, they tweaked the Lollapalooza lineup to list Stephens as a headliner alongside Charli XCX and Tate McRae. They also continued their tradition of taking some creative liberties with Obama’s summer picks, this time including “Attaboy!” from Audacity. “Obama is the biggest JaeBae,” Stephens says. “One day it’ll be real.”
It’s all fun and games until the jokes break containment. During a recent interview with KTLA 5 Morning News, Stephens had to set the record straight about some lighthearted fabrications, we’ll call them, that slipped through their fact-checking cracks. The first was that Khalid is her cousin. She’ll be hitting the road with him in Europe later this year, but there are no family ties, as far as we know. Stephens racks her brain for the other lie. “Oh, that ‘Afterbody’ was in the dictionary,” she says, referencing the equal parts sexy and sweaty Sellout single. “Yes, it’s very true. Haters will say it’s Photoshop. I didn’t correct them on that one. I let that slide.”
Inevitably, the lying started to catch up with her. “It has gotten to the point where when something good does happen to me for real, people don’t believe it,” Stephens says. “When ‘Afterbody’ was on Love Island last year, which was huge, I was like, ah, that’s so fun. Everybody thought it was fake. Everybody was like, ‘You literally just edited this.’ And you know what? That’s the price I pay.”
There are only more exciting (and real) achievements to come. “Sellout was me tackling [pop stardom] with a bit of tongue in cheek and with humor in an effort to get comfortable with chasing something bigger,” she says. “With Audacity, I’m fully stepping in it and I’m very confident in it. It feels less like something I’m hiding behind, and more like something I just am.”
