Score: 5/5 stars
The U.K. pop star’s latest album is effortlessly cool and demonstrates her knack for being ahead of the curve.
If you’ve scrolled through any corner of the internet or social media during the past three months, you’ve surely encountered a certain shade of vomit green, in most cases paired with an unfocused black lowercase type in the centre.
This captivating eyesore of a pairing was coined by the cover artwork to U.K. artist Charli xcx’s latest album BRAT, released on June 7. Though previously known for her 2014 hit “Boom Clap,” Charli has long been a prolific figure in the alternative pop music scene with several acclaimed releases and a loyal cult-like fanbase, deemed “Charli’s angels.”
To fans and critics, Charli’s approach to pop is regarded as a cut above the norm, laying the groundwork for the hyperpop subgenre which is characterized by exaggerated pop elements and aggressive synths. The plasticized nature of the hyperpop sound straddles the line between satire and legitimacy, a simultaneous parody of pop music’s consumeristic pandering and an intentional, artistic vision of what it could be.
Musical technicalities aside, what BRAT achieves in today’s pop culture landscape is a 360-degree view of cult pop stardom and an inquiry into what it means to be a “relatable” artist. Its grandeur feels like the beginning of a vibe shift in pop music, but Charli reminds listeners that she’ll always be one step ahead.
An element crucial to the BRAT ethos is the feeling of exclusivity, being “in the know.” Charli exercised this prior to any album title or cover artwork announcement by creating a private Instagram account with the username “360_brat” in August 2022.
She began teasing a new album at the end of 2023, with audio snippets of the lead single “Von dutch” on TikTok and a Boiler Room DJ set. Perhaps no better representation of the BRAT era’s exclusive quality is the limited tour for the album, with only seven dates in total.
The ongoing “brat summer” meme that followed the album’s release thrived off exclusivity and urgency: making the most of your time and getting in the club while there’s still room. It’s a brilliant marketing strategy that promoted both the album itself and Charli’s reputation as a cultural auteur. At the end of August, Charli confirmed on X (formerly Twitter) the eternal death of the meme with the message, “goodbye forever brat summer.”
Returning to the music itself, the album opens with “360,” a bouncy, concise track that touches on the essence of what it means to be, well, “brat.” Throughout the song, Charli pays tribute to various figures in her inner circle, including actress Julia Fox, model Gabriette and her longtime producer and collaborator A.G. Cook.
The effectiveness of the song as an opener is built on both its undeniable, earworm-level catchiness and just the right amount of irony to still be likeable.
The references Charli makes are to people many would not know — influencers and models heavily local to New York City and L.A. alone — though her sardonic tone implies an expectation that one should know, there’s also a palpable subtext of making fun of this expectation. The post-ironic tone addresses the relevance of people in the underground scene, but also feels like an earnest tribute to these last bastions of dying subcultures.
The second track, “Club classics,” sets the tone for the album’s aggressive club sound, with wonky bass and additional tributes to her creative collaborators. It’s no surprise why it was released as the album’s second single alongside “B2b,” both serving the purpose of keeping musical momentum at their respective places in the tracklist.
The brassy confidence of the first two tracks is quickly shot down by “Sympathy is a knife,” where Charli speaks on her insecurities around sharing a space with another, more commercially successful female peer in the industry who she “couldn’t even be if she tried.” Despite the reassurance she receives over being different from this individual, it’s difficult for the sympathies not to sting.
This same theme is examined later in “Girl, so confusing,” a tribute to the dynamic women in music, and the way they might feel after being pit against each other by fans. After weeks of fan speculation, the individual addressed in this track was revealed to be Lorde through a remix, whom Charli was often confused with as an ongoing internet meme inspired by a spoof interview.
In each verse she toys with the complexities of relationships between women, the feelings of similarity and difference and being at an awkward standstill at the mercy of fan narratives. She leaves with the idea that maybe the confusion is what they have in common.
A track largely overlooked in the collection is “Talk talk,” an approachable, straight-forward pop anthem where Charli sings from a place of anxiety wondering if an on-and-off partner of hers will speak to her in the club after a period of silence. It’s an anthem for the messy tension of the situationship age, always on the verge of bursting into something bigger, ending with the line “shall we go back to my place?,” confirming that he did, in fact, talk to her.
Few other tracks are quite as dynamic as the album’s centrepiece, “Everything is romantic,” which begins with lush synths and strings before rocketing into an up-tempo Brazilian funk melody. Maybe there truly is nothing more to the lyrics than just aesthetic impressions — maybe Charli would criticize the need to make sense of the song — but there is worthy commentary to be made about the snapshots she uses to paint the scene.
There is a shared element of transience among the objects and activities she lists off. From “early nights in white sheets with lace curtains,” to “winding roads doing manual drive,” she paints an idealized scene relying on the feelings evoked by snapshot moments. Even the rush of getting a “bad tattoo on leather tanned skin” exists in the moment itself. In part it feels like a testament to modern age aesthetics, for instance the satisfaction one might get scrolling a Pinterest board for summer fashion inspiration.
After the thumping techno bass, the track opens into ambience once again, finishing with the repetition of the line “fall in love again and again.” This drills home the mantra of romanticizing the fleeting nature of things and falling in love with the mere idea of romance again and again.
It should come as no surprise that BRAT has been hailed as Charli’s most emotionally vulnerable album to date. On several tracks the lyrics flow as a confessional stream of consciousness.
On the album’s first ballad, “I might say something stupid,” she addresses insecurities over feeling unwelcome in the realm of industry fame, being “famous but not quite.”
The theme of industry success returns on “Rewind,” where Charli calls herself out for previously never thinking about Billboard music charts but wondering again on how deserving she is of commercial success. This sentiment is reintroduced in the track “Mean girls,” which challenges the expectations placed on artists to be virtuous people.
It’s no coincidence that the track was inspired by Dasha Nekrasova of the controversial Red Scare podcast, challenging the perceptions and expectations people have about iconographic figures as being good role models. Can artists create good art without worrying about the peaking eyes of morality? Charli shrugs at that notion. After all, a banger is a banger.
Brattiness aside, the album’s narrative makes it hard not to root for Charli’s success. One of the strongest emotional moments is the ballad “So I,” a tribute to the late SOPHIE, a collaborator and friend.
Instead of purely dedicating the track to SOPHIE’s death, she redirects the attention to her own mistakes, such as pushing her away and being uncommitted to plans, a mistake too late to take back. It’s undoubtedly not an easy thing to admit, but she moves forward by acknowledging the advice bestowed upon her, playing on SOPHIE’s track “It’s Okay to Cry.”
BRAT’s final ballad and penultimate track, “I think about it all the time,” serves as an effort to put a lid on Charli’s doubts around industry success, redirecting her mental energy to the prospect of motherhood, aging and wondering if she’ll ever run out of time to achieve such things.
Her ruminations oscillate between wanting freedom from the responsibility of raising a child but worrying her career will not provide her with lasting meaning. It’s a touching sentiment on the perpetual question of parenthood, though it serves a larger purpose of addressing the universal feeling of time passing us by.
The touching sentiment of “I think about it all the time” is, rather humorously — or crudely — contrasted by the explosive closing track “365.” Beginning with a keyed-up interpolation of “360” before descending into something adjacent to ‘90s acid techno, the song is a welcome member to her near flawless lineup of closing tracks since her 2017 mixtape Pop 2. What these album closers share is their dissolution into the production, “365” ending on a bulldozer of a drop.
There’s no abundance of meaning to be extracted from the track, but what more is there to say? BRAT keeps its sentiments airtight, deliberately leaving room at the end to “keep bumpin’ that,” if you catch her drift.
With the amount of investment made for selling BRAT as a “club album,” there are a comfortable amount of moments that break up the high energy expectations one would have. Ironically, the end product could not have represented the emotional experience of being in the club scene better.
Ultimately, BRAT is a tribute to the elixir of confidence, self-doubt, euphoria and overthinking coursing through our system. It’s a reminder that even the girl who always seems to be on the V.I.P. list has endured her fair share of questioning whether she deserves to be there. BRAT hits nearly every mark in encapsulating this essence, and Charli has made it known that she’ll always have more tricks up her sleeve to move the needle in her favour.
Take BRAT as an invitation to stick around and find out.
