A Brat review and it's the same but it's The Spectator so it’s not

Charlotte Emma Aitchison couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate alias. “Charli xcx” is tacky, sure, but in a sophisticated, self-referential way; there’s an electronic mouthfeel to that “xcx” that makes fans participate in her synthetic, remixable echolalia just by saying her name. Even as a teen, Charli understood that there was an art to rave culture, idolizing DJs that pumped sweaty clubs with even sweatier anthems and shocked rooms with rattling 808s. Soon, Charli became the one performing at those raves (with her parents as chaperones, to her chagrin) and dropped her first mixtape, Heartbreaks and Earthquakes (2012). Although present-day Charli doesn’t stand behind her artistic decisions as a teen, there was an experimental and abrasive quality to her sound that became a launching pad for her current status as tomorrow’s pop provocateur. 

Although her early career delivered big commercial hits like “Boom Clap” (2014), “Fancy” (2014), and “I Love It” (2012), Charli began her winning streak in 2015 when she collaborated with PC Music, a record label famed for melding surrealism and pop music into a singular, shiny alloy: hyperpop. Though Charli grew into her sound and found an eclectic fanbase with some of her PC Music records, including Pop 2 (2017), many were critically panned upon release; the Pitchfork review on Charli’s now-popular EP Vroom Vroom (2017) even wrote that it “just sounds dead behind the eyes” (and not in a kitsch way). She had a hard time releasing her third studio album, Charli (2019), because of poor commercial success. Charli was a massive record full of features and crawling with artistic influences (notably SOPHIE, Scottish producer and DJ). But Charli’s pop persona has grown with new media and a broader hyperculture-induced ennui, which has embodied the new rave sound. By the 2020s, Vroom Vroom had topped every party playlist, made the unofficial Spectator anthem, and was re-reviewed on Pitchfork. That’s all to say: by the time she released Brat in June 2024, Charli xcx’s school of hyperpop had broken into the mainstream. So, on her latest album, she adopts a new artistic conduit: she’s that Y2K era pop diva, that fashion icon who’s lost all but one of her acrylics partying, and that it-girl who’s ready to beat down paparazzi who dare look at her the wrong way.

“The album started in the club,” Charli said in a recent Resident Advisor interview. Though she had found her artistic roots in club music, that her most popular album would be centered around ‘club classics’ was not inevitable. In fact, her 2022 album Crash, which she calls her “major label sell-out record” had an 80s dance-pop sound that bore no trace of the dirty London underground. So when she released the hot, turbulent single “360” this May—which would become Brat’s opening track—every it-girl clubbed the night in a fever of childlike joy. “Brat summer,” as the internet would come to call it, was born in this image. In the “360” music video, Charli brings together a pantheon of “hot it-girls” of the internet in a series of absurd, uncomfortable tableaus of narcissistic beauty and intimidation: Charli straddles an old man in a hospital bed as supermodel Hari Nef blows vape smoke in his face and influencer Alex Consani pulls the plug on his life support; Charli gyrates in a white tank-top and pours red wine down her chest while comedian/actress Rachel Sennot takes selfies in the background; ‘90s it-girl Chloë Sevigny emerges from a smoking car with a cigarette. In each scene and under many layers of irony, the women of the internet are reclaiming their own image with an infectious drama and certitude. The synth on “360” is remixed throughout the album, and the spirit of the rave is hammered into the rhythm of tracks like “Rewind,” “B2B,” “Mean Girls,” “Spring Breakers,” and “Von Dutch.” 

This sleazier, more grounded approach to Charli’s image does more than produce high-strung ragers; the slow and personal tracks are made stark and gripping. Rather than halting Brat’s cadence, they’re the apprehensive ascension to a roller coaster drop. “I Might Say Something Stupid” builds a wonderful sense of existential dread as Charli pours out her career insecurities over chillingly monotone percussion and frosted piano keys: “I don’t feel like nothing special / I snag my tights out on the lawn chair / Guess I’m a mess and play the role.” The lyrics are simple but perfectly encapsulate the kind of anxiety that settles like a brick in the stomach and shows itself at 3:00 a.m. Charli’s ambivalent musings extend to the second to last track, “I Think About It All the Time, ” where she confesses her stream of consciousness on potential motherhood; “So, we had a conversation on the way home / Should I stop my birth control? / ‘Cause my career feels so small / In the existential scheme of it all.” In an album built on themes of complex female relationships, mentioning motherhood is still surprising—but the pivot makes her emotions all the more poignant as she unveils the uncertainty and smallness behind her performance. Of course, on the next track, she immediately returns to talking about partying and “doing a little line.” The dance continues; it really is just girlhood.

In “Girl, So Confusing,” Charli talks about her multi-layered, entrenched relationships with other women in the industry. She recaliBrates her “awkward” relationship with 2010s pop icon Lorde, whose intentions she “can’t figure out.” It’s about the confused messaging of an apprehensive friendship, and in true Brat fashion, Charli works herself into an anxious confusion about the confusion itself and resolves into “Man, I don’t know, I’m just a girl (girl, girl, girl, girl).” Charli once said the lyrics on Brat were written like texts she’d sent a friend, and this statement was made literal when Lorde and Charlie released an “internet-breaking” remix of “Girl, So Confusing” together (Lorde revealed that she’d sent her verse to Charli in one long text). In the remix, listeners learn that Lorde was just as intimidated by Charli and just as insecure: “I was trapped in the hatred / And your life seemed so awesome / I never thought for a second / My voice was in your head.” In “Sympathy Is a Knife,” Charli interrogates another industry relationship, this time with Taylor Swift, a massive industry-backed musician for whom Charli opened in 2018. She expels more auto-tuned insecurities, shouting amidst explosive string hits “‘Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried / I’m opposite, I’m on the other side […] All this sympathy is just a knife.” She isn’t proud of this envy, though. Manically hoping to end her thoughts, she grows “volatile, at war with [this] dialogue.” Being Brat isn’t just the blind embrace and support of women, but, as Charli shows, growing as a woman through a deeper examination of her own thinking. 

The last track on Brat, “365,” remixes its first track, “360,”  and bookends some themes of the album (“who the [EXPLETIVE] are you? I’m a brat.”), before escalating into weirder and more unfamiliar sonic spaces. Some people think it’s capturing the experience of doing drugs at a party, but it feels more like the psychotropic experience of remembering and dancing through Brat itself. The album is cyclical and ubiquitous, and it’s packaged in an ugly, sour, ‘Brat green.’ If the ‘Swiftie’ summer of 2023 “slipped away into a bottle of wine,” the summer of 2024, Brat summer, is acid-stained into our brains. It’s recorded and re-recorded into all corners of the internet, aped in every corporate ad-campaign, permanent, irreverent, unapologetically-on-loop, sleeplessly dancing, brat,     brat,     brat,           brat, brat    brat brat.