Jae Stephens has a quirk of inserting her name into random words. For example: “I’m just trying to spread the a-jae-nda," she says with a giggle during a recent video call. The Los Angeles native is sitting demurely in her SoCal apartment, twiddling her hair while relaying the whirlwind press tour that took the artist into the boardrooms and onto the stages of New York City. “My Sweet 16 was on Habbo,” she says, namechecking the popular multiplayer roleplaying game to underscore just how chronically online she was an adolescent. “Any JaeBae knows that.” (That’s the name of her fanbase.)

It takes a certain level of audacity to create your own self-branded language but such popstar panache is hardly foreign for Stephens who has been steeped in stan culture since tweendom. Online pop fans in the mid-2010s first met her as the proprietor of popular Beyhive-turned-pop culture Tumblr blog, Beyoncebeytwice. During that era, she’d spend those aforementioned birthdays online in chatrooms with other anonymous avatars. “That's the kind of weirdo child I was,” she says.

These days, her public persona is a far cry from homebody. She’s rolling out her debut album, AUDACITY, a capital P-pop record that will manifest delusional confidence in its listeners via hilarious, audacious lyrics. On lead single “Attaboy!” she hopscotches between magisterial runs and literally dog-walking a suitor: “Took me out to dinner, but I wasn't impressed / So I never called back ‘cause I like when they beg / Next to me, he don't misbehave / Attaboy, attaboy, attaboy.” You can almost hear her smirk through the recording — but just as you begin laughing along, you start dancing.

Stephens was born in Dallas, but moved to the L.A. area when she was six. There, Jae and her brother quickly took advantage of the city's industry, booking commercials and cameos on Disney Channel. Her parents were always willing to go “all in” on Stephens’s early aspirations for the spotlight, enrolling her in acting and music lessons.

In high school, Stephens studied vocal performance at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts which counts Phoebe Bridgers, the Haim sisters, and Jordan Patterson as alumni. By day, Stephens was “in Glee” but by night she was growing her Tumblr presence, which is also where she began to share her earliest songs and build a community of “JaeBaes.”

LACHSA is a feeder school of sorts to the music industry, so it didn’t take long for Stephens to begin her career in earnest upon graduation. After a brief stint in London (to live her One Direction fan fantasy), she returned to L.A. and entered the grind of professional songwriting sessions, notching co-writing credits on songs for Chxrry, Ne-Yo, and Jennifer Lopez.

At the same time, Stephens was putting out her own music though, ever the critic, she doesn’t claim much of her earliest catalogue. Though not bad by any measure, songs like ”24K” and “Someone Else” sound like tried-and-true R&B and pop of the late 2010s-era: sleek, slinky, and cool to the touch.

“I had one foot in, one foot out on the artist thing,” she recalls of that time. “Being a songwriter is much easier. Your job is over when you leave the studio. Being an artist is heavier. I just wasn't sure I could commit to it.” In 2022, her manager submitted her into a competition to win a deal with Issa Rae’s newly launched label, Raedio — which she won. “I was like, Oh wow, people see something here,” she remembers. With that, it was time for Stephens to officially commit to the bit.

In 2022, Stephens released her first EP with Raedio, High My Name Is, but her true artistic vision only came crashing into clarity when she recorded her buzzy, 2025 internet hit “Body Favor” – a song with bouncing, Neptunes-like production and lyrics that put her humor on display. On it, she sings “Sour on top, but it's sweet below / But how many licks 'til you reach it, though?”

“Everybody was like, Who can we pitch this [song] to? I was like, We can't send this to anyone. I don't know anybody who sounds like this,” she says.

Stephens continued refining that nostalgic but sleek sound across three EPs that would become part of the compilation project, TOTAL SELLOUT. As her star was rising, she was taking notes from her label boss Issa Rae, whose entrepreneurialism and straightforward mindset served as a guidepost. “There's always 50 million things that she’s having to deal with while we're having dinner. I really fuck with that,” Stephens says of Rae. “[Issa is] quick to be like, Bitch, if it’s not paying your bills, it doesn’t matter.”

Indeed, bill-paying moves were being made: In 2025, Stephens opened for British pop trio FLO which vastly expanded her Jae-bae fanbase. Though Stephens claims she’s “pulled back” from joking with her very online fans, on any given day you can find her writing no-caps posts that inspire a round of keyboard smashes from the pop polloi. Plus, her fans have enough inside jokes to go around; when I mention her to a co-worker, she tells me she used to think Stephens was Idris Elba’s daughter after Stephens made a viral joke claiming she was the industry’s new nepo baby of Elba.

With an entire era as a fully embodied pop star in her rearview, Stephens is ready to apply all the lessons she learned as both stan and stanned in Audacity. It’s her “break up” album but done the Jae-way: “My response to this breakup was not, 'I'm so sad and I don't know how to go on without you.' It was literally, 'That was a fucking waste of time. Fuck you. I’m up.” She bursts into laughter.

AUDACITY by Jae Stephens is out September 25. Pre-order here.