Reneé Rapp recalls how being ‘drugged and missing’ helped inspire her track ‘Snow Angel’

Reneé Rapp has recalled the painful time she was drugged and how she found closure through her latest single, “Snow Angel”.

Rising star Rapp is making waves in the music industry after releasing her debut album Snow Angel last month. It comes after the 23-year-old singer and actor shocked fans by announcing her departure from TV series The Sex Lives of College Girls, where she played fan-favourite lesbian college student Leighton Murray.

The bisexual artist’s pop career has already seen major success with the biggest first week sales for a debut album by a female artist in 2023. Now, with her sights set on an upcoming US and European tour, Rapp has talked about the personal experiences behind the record’s biggest tracks.

Appearing on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast on Monday (4 September), Rapp revealed the harrowing back-story behind single and album title track “Snow Angel”.

While living in Los Angeles in early 2022, fresh from a break-up and on a career break, Rapp was experiencing “freedom … for the first time” when she fell in with a group of toxic party-goers.

“I had heard from my family and friends around me that this wasn’t a good group for me but we were just sending it,” she said.

“I had always had to nail myself to the ground and been so incredibly nervous, and for the first time I really let my judgement go. And we were all going out and [there] was situation after situation where they were just not trustworthy.”

On one particular occasion, Rapp remembered waking up in a toilet stall in a hotel bar at five in the morning. “I woke up and I was just so confused. I had blood on my pants and caught off guard,” she said. 

“I looked at my phone and I was like: ‘What happened?’ I had missed two texts from friends I was with at 10.30 the night before. Seven hours had gone by.

“I still have no idea what happened but I was drugged and missing for seven hours. I stopped being friends with those people and stopped doing as much partying.

“I told my parents and some of my friends and just explained it in a really matter-of-fact way and they were all very concerned and I didn’t really understand what was happening.

“I was crying and so upset and very confused and resentful of the friends I was with.”

It took several months for Rapp to process the events of the night and when she started writing her debut album earlier this year (alongside co-writer Alexander 23), she knew she wanted to talk about the experience.

“Alexander said: ‘I really want to write the song’,” Rapp continued. “We started writing it, just the two of us, and the whole time we were writing I felt nothing until we hit record and the whole thing was done and I played it for my friends.

“They were like: ‘This is insane’. That to me was all resilience and I still don’t know how I feel about it, I just know I feel weird.”

It’s not the first time Rapp has opened up about her personal struggles an how they’ve impacted her career. In an interview with The Guardian, she spoke about how her time playing Regina George in Broadway’s Mean Girls was shaped by body-shaming comments from fellow cast mates, which fuelled an eating disorder.

Meanwhile, after Rapp was cast in Mindy Kaling’s hit series The Sex Lives of College Girls, she feared a homophobic backlash for portraying a queer character on screen.

Rapp is now embracing her sexuality, as proven in her sapphic music video “Pretty Girls” which was directed by queer model Cara Delevingne.

Snow Angel is available to stream now. More information about Reneé Rapp’s 2023 tour can be found here.