reviewing an album six months after it’s been out is so brat

Review of Charli XCX's "brat but it’s completely different but also still brat"

Charli XCX—brat but it’s completely different but also still brat

Released June 7, June 10, October 14 2024

Okay, it’s not like I’ve been living under a rock for the last six months and am completely unaware of this album. I’m as chronically online as anyone else so, of course, I haven’t been immune to the absolute takeover this album had over the summer. And because I’m as addicted to TikTok as the next person, I’ve heard more than my fair share of these songs before as I was scrolling my FYP. But I knew I wanted to give this album the dedicated sit-down listen it deserved, so I put it on the list and did my best to not come to any conclusions before I listened to the full project.

It would have been so easy to make this entirely a partygirl, reliving the clubbing days of her youth kind-of album. But Charli, ever the visionary, didn’t do that. Instead, underneath the bright brat green and big name collaborations, this album is really one of questioning, insecurity, grief, and regret. Called “trenchant, raw, and affecting,” the 31 year old Charli really opens up and shares honestly about what’s plaguing her.

Her follow-up album, including all of the remixes and collaborations she worked on since the original release, poses additional questions, particularly changing the worries Charli had about her career pre-brat to now address her “sudden breakneck ascent.”

This might be the album that launched Charli XCX to a household name, but she’s been at this game for a very long time. Starting out at 14, Charli was playing illegal warehouse raves after initially putting her music up on Myspace. Her parents, her Scottish father and Ugandan mother, actually went with her to the gigs and supported her early career by giving their daughter a loan to make her first independent album. From there, she released music on her own Orgy Music label in 2008 before eventually signing to Asylum/Atlantic Records in 2010. After she left the rave scene to attend art school, she felt “lost” and later said she was “too young to have [her] own vision at that point.” She left university after only a year to give music another chance, which led to the label sending her out to LA for writing sessions with different producers. It wasn’t until a session with Ariel Rechtshaid, who had worked with Sky Ferriera, Solange, and Haim, that Charli started formulating her own vision and “things started to come together.”

Her first album True Romance “poised Charli as a Tumblr-pop princess, full of glitchy synths and upbeat electro-pop” and was “innovative enough to keep her away from being filed under ‘mainstream pop’ yet strong enough to begin to establish herself as a upcoming artist to be reckoned with.” 2014 would be the year that really launched her career, after the success of Icona Pop’s “I Love It” (written by Charli and included her vocals), her collaboration on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” and with her album Sucker including singles like “Boom Clap” and “Break the Rules.” In 2016, she launched Vroom Vroom recordings, aimed as producing her “brand new experimental pop” inspired by her new collaborators SOPHIE and A.G. Cook.

For her entire career, Charli has been on the forefront of pop. Some might try to pigeonhole her as electropop or “dark pop,” but Charli has always done her own thing. 2022’s crash was Charli’s next attempt at a commercial pop record, but it failed to do as well as she anticipated. So back to her roots she went and came back with brat, which really is a continuation of what Charli’s been working at for almost 10 years, reflecting her rave “roots, featuring glitchy pop tracks that eschewed traditional songwriting convention.”

In a recent trend of artists releasing albums with 30 plus tracks, Charli “turned abundance into something more artistic,” with none of the tracks feeling “repetitive or overly long.”

My favorites are “360 featuring robyn & yung lean,” “Sympathy is a knife featuring ariana grande,” “I might say something stupid featuring the 1975 & jon hopkins,” “Talk talk featuring Troye Sivan,” “Von dutch,” “Everything is romantic featuring caroline polachek,” “So I,” “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde,” “Apple,” “B2b featuring tinashe,” “I think about it all the time,” “Hello goodbye,” “Guess,” and “Spring breakers featuring kesha.”

On “360,” I do love all of the references to Gabriette, Julia Fox, and producer A.G. Cook. This album really is a world in and of itself, with its own cast of characters. And perhaps not shockingly as I am largely an elderly woman in a young person’s body, but I am not much of a clubbing person (the only time I’ve ever been clubbing is a Taylor Swift-themed disco that I went to completely sober). But even I have to admit I have caught myself throughout the day, at random times, saying “bumpin’ that.”

“Club Classics” introduces us to more characters in the wider BMU—brat Musical Universe. The track was co-written and produced by the future Mr. XCX, George Daniel of the 1975 himself. This collaboration, both personal and professional, also links Charli and her cast of characters to the ’75/Dirty Hit universe. In addition to Cook, mentioned on “360,” and Daniel, producer pioneer SOPHIE and HudMo are also shouted out in this track. Ultimately this song is a love letter to clubbing culture, which is all the more potent in a post-pandemic nostalgia kind of way. In response to lockdown during the pandemic and the subsequent attempts at a return to before, this song has themes of hedonism and in some ways feels like a reaction against the girl summer phenomenon of 2023. For a summer that was all about pink, sparkle, feather boas, cowboy boots, fruit themes, and disco balls, summer 2024 featured the now-signature brat green, smudged eye makeup, sticky basements, and DJ sets and brat was the soundtrack of that.

Where “360” and “Club Classics” were singles that were released prior to the album, it would have been easy to assume the entire album would be this one-note party album. But Track 3 “Sympathy is a Knife” highlights brat’s secret weapon—its sincerity. Throughout this album, Charli repeatedly hides her vulnerability and insecurities under layers of autotune, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. This song hears her struggling with fame, career, and comparison, referencing another pop singer who’s at her boyfriend’s show. Allegedly this is a reference to Taylor Swift and her brief fling with Matty Healy, including a surprise appearance at a 1975 gig in London in January 2023. However, I would like to propose an alternative theory that the person Charli is referencing here is not Swift, but rather FKA Twigs, who Healy dated from 2019 to early 2022. Even though Swift is one of the biggest stars in the world and it would be easy to be jealous of her if you were another pop musician, Charli has never indicated a desire to make music as commercially pop as Swift, instead making music that is more experimental and based in electronic music, which is more in the style of Twigs.

It’s obvious that at this point in her career, before it entirely changed, Charli was struggling. Whether it was struggling with whether it was time to move on from her music, struggling with the fame that she had accumulated thus far, or struggling with personal issues, all of these struggles can be heard across the album. “I might say something stupid” is her grappling with whether it’s time to walk away from her career. It is interesting hearing this song, which was obviously written by a pre-brat Charli in a pre-brat world, now after the album had its major moment this summer. If anything, it feels like the success of brat has given Charli her answer, but it remains to be seen if this is just the beginning, or a last hurrah.

“So I” is amongst one of the most vulnerable moments on the album. In addition to being my favorite track sonically and vocally, it’s also heart-wrenchingly honest. Prior to SOHIE’s passing in 2021, Charli was a close friend and collaborator, but admittedly maybe wasn’t the best friend she could have been. That’s a brave thing to admit, especially publicly on a Grammy-nominated album. When someone passes, it can bring up feelings of guilt and regret over things said or unsaid or time we didn’t spend with them. But as many would be quick to push those feelings down, Charli doesn’t, instead freely admitting she has regrets.

“Apple”—the song that launched a thousand brat summers. Who would have expected a song about family trauma to be so catchy? I couldn’t stop singing “the airport, the airport, the airport” in Charli’s autotuned way. Thanks to TikTok creator Kelley Heyer and her Apple dance, the song took on a life of its own, becoming a TikTok trend, a way for Charli to bully her fiancé George Daniel for not participating, and a significant moment on the SWEAT world tour in which an “Apple girl” would be chosen at each show to perform the dance on camera from the floor. This moment in the show became a viral moment in and of itself as not once, but twice were there Apple-crashers, or audience members who overshadowed the chosen “Apple girl” in their moment in the spotlight.

“B2b” is a reminder at just how long Charli has been at this game. The song sounds like a cut track from Sucker was resurrected and remixed.

“I think about it all the time” is another vulnerable moment for Charli on the record. In true brat fashion, she might be a sad girl, but she’s a dancing sad girl. I think we’ve finally come around to seeing the use of autotune or vocoder as a tool, not just an indictment of a singer’s lack of talent, and Charli uses this tool to it’s maximum potential. This use of autotune makes her vocal performances really interesting. Speaking in this track about feeling like her career is small and unimportant, and questioning if she should give it up to become a mother, knowing the "the knowledge it might inspire, [but also] the freedom it might snatch away,” I wonder how this past year has changed her thinking on this.

“365” is meta in that it is a remix of “360,” creating a loop of the album and also now reveals itself as an indicator of what is to come on the follow-up album. It shows Charli as an innovator, and also an artist who is interested in innovating on top of her own existing work.

Of the three songs from the follow-up, brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not, “Hello goodbye” is an underrated gem. I don’t know why it’s not talked more about, except maybe because it’s the only song to not have a collaboration version on the remixed collaborations version. In any case, I liked it and think it’s one of my top picks.

“Spring breakers” referencing “Boom Clap” once again shows how Charli references and builds off her own work.

Before I dive deep into the collaborations version of the album, I first just want to say how smart it was of Charli to have the guest songs be so different from the originals. From an artists’ perspective, it keeps the project fresh for Charli, allows her to collaborate with contemporaries, and allows her to offer additional perspectives than the original song could. But it’s also interesting the way she went about crafting this expanded album. As Shaad D’Souza wrote for Pitchfork, by completely overhauling some tracks on the record “to the point that I’m not sure they’d qualify under Billboard’s rules for remixes contributing to a song’s Hot 100 placement,” Charli doesn’t do what other artists do in that they release “so many superfluous remixes” for the very purpose of benefitting their Hot 100 placement. By essentially creating another, standalone song that is not a remix of its predecessor, Charli is both competing with herself and showing how little she cares for playing the game of chart placements and battles for Number One.

The collaborations on this portion of the album are also interesting as they show a lineage of influence and who Charli sees as her contemporaries.

“360 featuring robyn and yung lean,” had a Nelly Furtado energy that had me thinking, is Charli the next Furtado? Or is Charli so much her own artist with her own vision that she is Furtado’s successor in style and attitude, but retains her own creative identity? I really liked the guest verses from Yung Lean and Robyn, thinking they added another sound texture to the track.

A standout amongst the collaborations was “Sympathy is a knife featuring ariana grande.” The rewrite of the verses makes this version even more honest, more direct, and all of this even more so with the inclusion of Ariana Grande. Grande is such a perfect choice for this song that I cannot think of any other artist who could have possibly taken this on, but her. Not only does she sound great on this track, she’s always sounded great when singing on a dance track, but also thematically given the message of the song is she the perfect choice. The song “explores the pressures of being under constant scrutiny from the press, public and fake friends.” The production on this is also really interesting, again I love that Charli didn’t just change a few bits in the production, but took the opportunity to make something entirely new out of each new version.

I’ve made it no secret how much I love the 1975, so of course I was overjoyed to see the band featured on a song. I suppose I would have been more surprised if they weren’t featured in some way, given Charli’s engagement to drummer George Daniel, his work across her other projects since they’ve been together, and Charli’s relationship professionally with the band and other Dirty Hit labelmates. In the same year that Charli grew to superstar status, 1975 frontman Matty Healy, you could argue, had a massive fall from grace after there was much speculation around his relationship with Taylor Swift stemming from her album The Tortured Poets Department released in April. But the drama between Swift and Healy aside, Charli is not abandoning her friend, but she is poking fun at him a bit by having him on the aptly titled song “i might say something stupid,” which many would say is the story of Healy’s life. But in typical Healy fashion, he turns a jab about himself into an introspective moment. The song sounds like something from the band’s Notes on a Conditional Form era, in which the most raw and introspective songs are hidden beneath the band’s most experimental production.

This might have been Charli’s summer, but she was bringing her friends with her and no one quite matches her energy like Troye Sivan. In addition to their co-headlining SWEAT tour and their previous collaboration on 2018’s “1999,” the pair teamed up again for the remix of “Talk talk.” Sivan is a rare found-online talent that is truly underrated. Despite making music since 2012, he didn’t really have a mainstream hit until his 2023 album Something to Give Each Other which had “One of Your Girls” and “Rush.” For many of us who remember his time as a Youtuber, his turn towards music has been one of surprising success. Not surprising in the sense that Sivan’s not talented, he is, but it’s surprising in that few online creators, especially ones from the earliest generations of Youtubers, can ever truly shed their association with the internet and become a bona fide pop star, but Sivan has.

“Von dutch a.g. cook remix featuring addison rae,” really feels like Charli appointing her own successor in Rae, another online creator trying to make a career in mainstream pop, but in my personal opinion, Rae feels like the natural successor to Lana Del Rey. As much as she wants to put forward this party girl persona, her song “Diet Pepsi,” had LDR vibes written all over it. As we are yet still anticipating a complete debut from Rae, all eyes will be on her when she does to see, for one, if “Diet Pepsi” was a flash in the pan or if she can really sustain a musical career, and two, to see whose style she falls in line with—Charli or Lana, or something entirely new.

Ever since I reviewed her 2019 album Pang, I have been a Caroline Polachek fan and I was so happy to see her included on this version of the album. More so than with other collaborations on the album, I feel like Charli made the effort to make this in the style of Polachek’s usual work. Rather than bringing an artist like Billie Eilish or Ariana Grande into the world of Charli XCX and brat, it feels more Charli took visit over to Polachek’s world and the song is all the better for it.

There are quite a few songs where the remix is the obvious definitive version, like in the case of “Sympathy is a knife,” “Girl, so confusing,” and “Guess,” but on “So I,” I prefer the original version to the remixed and collaborated version. I like the production and vocals better, and the lyrics feel more sincere. The remixed version feels like an attempt to hide from those vulnerabilities and regrets behind her usual brattiness.

The tide of brat changed with the dropping of “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde.” This will be the defining moment when brat went from an album to a cultural moment. Variety said it was “as innovative lyrically as the other [tracks on the album] are musically.” Not only did it bring Lorde out of her hiatus, but it set up a philosophy of honesty that now feels apparent throughout the whole album, but might have gone unnoticed without this collaboration. As much as this album is an homage to the party days of Charli’s youth where she cut her teeth dj-ing parties as a teenager, it’s also an album of a 31 year old woman who’s really taking stock of her life and trying to make amends.

Continuing to pull in artists from the wider 1975/Dirty Hit universe, Charli taps The Japanese House for the “Apple” remix. The two versions of the song represent the entire brat project at its best—both versions are good, but different enough that they can stand on their own.

“B2b featuring tinashe,” is made better by the inclusion of Tinashe, her voice just takes the song to another level. This song somewhat answers my earlier question of how much the remixed version is an response to the success of its parent version. This new version is ultimately about fatigue. The lyrics reference how, two days after Tinashe was asked to collaborate, the vocals were cut. This lines up with how “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde” came about very quickly after the first version of the song was released. Some might assume, cynically, that the remixed version of the album was always in the works and its feeling of immediacy and real-time reactionary presence is predetermined, but it speaks to Charli’s visionary talent that she was able to think and act quickly and not sacrifice quality in the process.

“Mean girls featuring julian casablancas,” much like “I might say something stupid featuring the 1975 and jon hopkins” is a vast improvement with the features than the versions without. The inclusion of artists like Polachek and the 1975 show who Charli considers her contemporaries, Eilish and Grande show Charli’s aspirations, while the inclusion of Addison Rae shows Charli looking to the future and the inclusion of Casablancas shows Charli paying respect to the past. Not only does Casablancas sound great and this version is made better than its predecessor because of his involvement, but it’s interesting given Charli’s collaboration and platforming of The Dare. The Dare, whose real name is Harrison Patrick Smith and who I’ve written about before investigating if he really is the second-coming of Indie Sleaze, but discovering what he’s instead referencing is Casablancas and his era of ‘00s post-punk revival in New York. Charli’s affinity for clubbing, dance music, and the art of DJ-ing is well-documented, and her collaborations with both The Dare and Casablancas says, to me, that her affinity for this music is in this ‘00s NYC Strokes kind of way more than it is in this newly-invented, fuzzily defined Indie Sleaze way.

A very surprising collaboration was the one with Bon Iver on a remix of “I think about it all the time.” I really loved his verse and his voice on this track, and it has a kinda of ‘80s throwback sound, but given his recent collaborations on Taylor Swift’s folklore and evermore, I now associate him in woodsy, folk kind of space. As this was dawning on me that Bon Iver has now collaborated with both Swift and Charli, if we are to believe that “Sympathy is a knife” is about Charli’s insecurity brought on by her personal relationship with Swift, is there something to read into about Bon Iver’s collaboration on both sides of the (alleged) feud?

Don’t hate me for this, but I don’t know that Billie Eilish adds much to the “Guess” remix that I’m that particularly excited about it. Don’t get me wrong, Eilish is a big get for this project and I think that speaks to both how big this album was from the jump, but also speaks to Charli’s growing standing as a major pop girl, despite how weird or electronic her music might be in comparison to her contemporaries. But other than that, I don’t find the two versions of the two songs that different, meaning that nothing would push me to picking one version over the other.

Another surprising but very welcome surprise collaborator was Kesha on “Spring breakers.” While not on the official tracklist released on October 11, the song appears on a second release of the …also still brat album, which is itself a third version of the album. (The timeline of versions of this album in existence is rather confusing and a whole other conversation.) What an incredible, resilient career Kesha has had. Mark my words, we will study not just her music, but also her resolve and hold her in high regard ten years from now. She sounds amazing and slips so easily back into that TiK ToK Kesha of old that made her iconic to begin with. She has artistically moved on, working on 2023’s Gag Order with Rick Rubin about her experience of speaking out about her abuse at the hands of producer Dr. Luke. But I love knowing that experience didn’t break her and didn’t dim her, that the Kesha that we first met all those years ago is still in there.

It’s interesting having just listened to Zach Bryan’s self-titled album before this one as they both tackle the issue of fame, but from two different approaches. Where Bryan’s inclination is to push away and deflect, Charli asks “How can I use this, how can this be a tool, how I can make this work for me?” Instead of letting it consume her, as we’ve sadly seen happen to many a star, Charli has the “idea that fame is too potent, too damaging, and too deliriously intoxicating for any one person to deal with in a ‘normal’ way.” So like Bowie and other artists before her, her approach is that of a “Warholian art project, the likes of which the pop world had not seen since early Lady Gaga." She said in an interview that “You can play games with it,…and I think that’s a very interesting part of being an artist as well, when you can use that thing — fame, publicity — as a tool.”

No where is this use of fame as a tool more evident than in the marketing of the album. This truly was a brat summer with the “now-iconic chartreuse cover” was every where from the DNC and out of the mouth of Jake Tapper who said “I will aspire to be brat,” to Barack Obama’s summer playlist, a sold-out Madison Square Garden show, and every brand with a half-way decent social media presence. Some might say the marketing and the ubiquitous presence of this album superseded the quality of the music itself, with one reviewer writing that their issue with the album “is that it insists upon itself, it’s being propelled more so by the media spectacle of it all than the actual art.” But ultimately what I think this says about Charli is that she knows how to deftly navigate a massive influx of eyes on her. Where another artist might see the success of the initial release and call it a day, Charli saw an opportunity to stretch what could have been a “stationary, isolated moment” and turn it into an defining moment. 2024 will never be spoken about without mentioning brat.

From an outside perspective, it feels like Charli’s been quietly but consistently releasing innovative and influential music, but to not much acclaim, so when the massive success from this album came her way, it was like “Finally!” But by her own admission, it was necessary for Charli to go through that period of working away for years in order to make something like brat. When her first big album “Sucker” was released, she said she “wasn’t quite ready for fame” and “it was a relief when she got more time to hone her vision outside of the brightest spotlight.” She continued, “I wasn’t a fully formed artist at that point, I was definitely moving in the right direction, but I hadn’t compiled all of these parts of my art and put them through this funnel that made everything really potent.” Through her work with SOPHIE and A.G. Cook, who made indelible impressions on her artistry, Charli began to take more risks and push limits, all of which culminates in what is now brat.

A major element that made brat what it is and what makes it so successful is that it was made with the assumption that it was “not going to appeal to a lot of people.” Charli made the music that she wanted to make, with no presumption towards making it for mainstream palette, and learned from her previous experiences that “Nothing about this world makes any sense—so you might as well use your 15 minutes being as uncompromisingly weird as possible.” This album was incredibly gutsy of its creator to make, in many ways, a kind-of Hail Mary for the artist, who was already debating with herself about the endurance of her career. And not only has it been her biggest career success, but she has completed a rare feat in that the album is “a commercial juggernaut not rendered uncool by its popularity.”

Even more impressive than that is how the collaborations version of the album isn’t just a watered-down remix version of the album, but it “enriches the Brat listening experience and the understanding of Charli XCX's artistry” and is “as relevant—and just as reflective of the zeitgeist—as its parent album.”

It feels like this album came at exactly the right time for Charli. She made the kind of music that allows her to pay homage to the music she first started making and that made her first start making music, allows her to collaborate with friends, contemporaries, and idols a like, and that allows her to be the most free and honest version of herself as an artist. The fact that it’s been a massive success for her should show her, and us, that there is room in the genre for this more experimental, less neat and tidy style of pop music.