Even if you have not listened to any of her music—whether directly, in passing on a TikTok audio, or seeing her face show up on Instagram Reels—it’s obvious that Jensen McRae is ascending in a way that you don’t see often with indie rock/pop artists. With an alto reminiscent of Tracy Chapman, her obvious forebear, McRae’s guitar-driven songs often shock with their clarity and intimacy. What differentiates her from a lot of her interlocutors is how she cultivates her online persona, not aloof and distant like label mates Mitski or Clairo, but rather transparently, not too different from her documented idol Taylor Swift, who makes it seem as if her fans are her friends from how much they know about her personal life.

Any breakdown of McRae’s career must start with Phoebe Bridgers, a close bedfellow in the intimate folk genre that McRae draws from. In 2020, a tweet about a future Bridgers cut caught the public eye, cosigned by Bridgers herself. Seizing on this moment, McRae wrote the song “Immune” and released the EP, Who Hurt You? in 2021. Most of that EP found itself on her stellar debut album, Are You Happy Now?, which was released in 2022 and was produced by Rhaki. This album’s main flaw was that it often sounded like an artist finding her voice and sound—filled with iron-clad hooks next to overwrought chamber folk pieces—but there was a rough-and-ready spirit to it. Three years after that, McRae had her major label debut with Dead Oceans, the label that contains Bridgers as well as other Gen Z staples like Mitski and MUNA. Dead Oceans is the perfect home for the type of indie rock vibe that McRae creates: her lyrics are spare yet dense enough to evoke curiosity, the spaciness that only lets in guitars and impassioned vocals. What makes McRae stand out is that she allows some impressive vocal performances or mellifluous flourishes compared to some of her labelmates who are known for “cursive” or “whisper” singing. I think of the staccato-like way she chews on her lyrics or the chamber folk and lite-disco sonics of her previous albums. McRae’s writing is heavily influenced by her idol, Swift, though her songs do not rely on Easter eggs, like Swift’s sometimes do, as much as specific, unwavering detail, a trademark of Gen Z musicians who often seem to dump their camera roll into their music.

I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! bursts open with “The Rearranger,” which starts with twinkling melodies before developing into a full-band chorus, exiting with the title chanted over and over. The lyrics take you into a car after a sleepless night, the sunrise your only solace for realizing you’re in an entanglement that will only end in disaster. The songwriting is vague enough that you can easily insert yourself into it, but there are always some tiny details, like the “all-nighter,” that reinforce the memory as McRae’s. The tracks lean on this type of songwriting; ”Savannah,” one of the highlights about the titular city, leans on the concept of a place important to someone that haunts you longer than the person did, but at the end, when McRae declares she’s going with someone who treats her better, she makes the song wholeheartedly hers again.

Although the tracks have predictable structures, they vacillate elegantly, giving the more touching topics, like surviving domestic abuse on “Daffodils,” the space and grounding they need. Sonically, the album is taut and consistent: bright tracks that slot gorgeously in movie opening credits (“The Rearranger”), songs that glimmer with Gen Z ennui (“Novelty,” “I Can Change Him”), and piano ballads that authorize heavy topics (“Tuesday,” “Daffodils”). The most thrilling moments in the record are obvious: the yelping “FUCK” in the rollicking, country-licked “Let Me Be Wrong,” the sharp pop instincts in lead single “Praying For Your Downfall,” where she twists the cliché of grudges taking over your life, and the humorous assertion of “I Don’t Do Drugs,” a title that meditates on how healing and grief are non-linear. These moments are thrilling because they break the album’s often rigid structure.

Whether it is the major label debut or the online environment that has been essential to her cultivation, I can’t help but taste a sterility in the album. While McRae’s brassy, distinctive vocals and sharp pen are here, there is something off-putting about the album’s brief runtime, the swath of 2-minute and 30-second tracks that reek of algorithmic slipstream strategizing, or how her influences, especially Taylor Swift, appear too prominently. The fans of Swift and the fans of the type of singer-songwriter-indie-rock music that McRae creates overlap completely, but this is the case for the hundreds of artists who populate the playlist alongside her, so I will give her some slack.

As aforementioned, the songwriters of our generation often use detail so specific that it shrinks the song to an audience of one. Often, it works, especially when you consider the significance of finding meaning in someone else’s diaristic writing. At times, McRae can overdo it. Compared to the morning-after “Novelty” that makes you chuckle at the image of “navy bedsheets” and sneaking out early so the roommate doesn’t hear, the lead single, “Massachusetts,” grates with how overstuffed it is with the specifics, like the novelty ashtray or the guitars on the wall. It seems Swiftian and a bit alienating when the rest of the album strikes a perfect balance between specific and universally relatable.

Although the album is strikingly over-relatable, it is defensible when you consider the tracks on her debut album. The best moments of Are You Happy Now? were levied on the songs that made her stick out in the particularly saturated genre of indie rock, particularly by putting her identity as a Black woman up front. There is the triptych interlude of “Headlock,” these slack-demo tracks that shocked with the sterling vulnerability of a young Black girl learning from her parents that she does not look like the girls in the magazine, or “White Boy,” that exorcises not feeling good enough for what seems like the pinnacle of desire: a white boy. There were also plenty of genre experiments that, at the very least, had an admirable spirit: the folk-disco of “With The Lights On,” the sunny, triumphant pop of “Dead Girl Walking.” Whether effective or not, it helped make the listening experience much more pleasant, especially when the tight, organized nature of I Don’t Know How… might go against one of the album’s main themes: the messiness of growing up and falling in and out of love. Although the centering of her Blackness might seem like a songwriter wielding her identity to make her music distinctive, it is rather a young woman embracing all aspects of her identity in a way that is unabashedly and proudly hers, especially in a genre where people who aren’t white aren’t as visible unless your name is Mitski.

I also can’t help but speculate on the record’s different shape, especially when considering it as McRae’s Dead Oceans debut. This story is as old as time—an artist’s stronger instincts get sanitized by an executive head’s meddling. This concept has been seen with Maggie Rogers’ overproduced debut that lacks the glorious conviction of her later work or the opening couplet of Lucy Dacus’ “Come Out,” where Dacus sings about “a board room full of old men guessing what the kids are getting into.” Perhaps right now it works, especially as it gets McRae onto the map and into the territory of her idols. But it’s a double-edged sword, as it seems like her artistic integrity gets thrown out the window for the sake of consumerism, pulling her into a music genre that often homogenizes into an indistinctive mush.

Whether this meditation on the album’s inner workings matters to you or not, the album executes its themes flawlessly in spite of it. It is a record, just like Tracy Chapman’s work, that is able to stun and awe with its unflinching detail, reflecting your romance troubles, identity crises, and the inexplicable metamorphoses that have been spawned by being loved and loving back to you. It is also the perfect vehicle for McRae’s further thrusting into the limelight. Give her a few years, and she will be inescapable.