Tate McRae Changed Her Album Art for "So Close to What," but Why Did She Do That?

The release of a new album is always a cause for celebration, especially when you're a fan of the artist. For fans of Tate McRae, though, the release of "So Close to What" has come with a mix of the normal excitement as well as some confusion. That confusion stems mainly from the fact that Tate seems to have changed up the album art for the cover at the last moment, and many fans say it's for the worse.

Following the discovery that Tate had changed her album art, many wanted to better understand why she'd made the change. Here's what we know.

Tate has not officially explained her decision to swap out her cover art from an image of her with her back turned looking at herself to a much simpler image of herself with her hands crossed. She might have just decided that she liked the new cover better, but some fans definitely disagree.

"Honestly I am so disappointed. I really love the OG one. I understand if she had two versions of the album, but flat-out changing the album cover just feels unprofessional IMO," one person wrote on Reddit.

Others were OK with the change: "I actually don’t mind the new cover at all. I can see tons of fans wearing short jean shorts and white tanks to her tour now because of it. Anything she can do to make Tate be an icon or a trend, I think she’ll do it. Marketing wise I think it was a good move. The other one is more creative, but I think this one kinda pops more."

While we might never know the exact reason that Tate decided to change the album art, some have wondered if it's connected to the fact that the album leaked days before its official release. During a Spotify event to promote the album, she acknowledged that the leak had made her look at it differently.

"Unfortunately, a lot of the album got leaked, which was a f--king bummer," she said. "And I think obviously that makes you look at the project differently."

"I was just so devastated because I’m like, ‘There’s nothing I can do about this. The whole project is online,'" she added.

Tate also said that some of the leaked versions of songs were not fully sound mixed the way they should have been, which may have left some fans with a misleading impression of what the final tracks that are actually on the album sound like.

"The demo never sounds how you want it to sound. There’s so much missing,” she said. “And yeah, at that point I was just like, 'Ah, they’re not done or how I want them.' And that was hard.”

While we don't know whether the leak had anything to do with the change in art, it seems possible that she wanted to put the leaked version behind her, which also meant putting that album cover behind her.