This year, the name of the brash, formerly underground pop star Charli XCX and her album “Brat” showed up a lot of places I never in my wildest dreams expected: the floor of the Democratic National Convention; Fox News and CNN (“I will aspire to be brat,” the anchor Jake Tapper vowed to a perplexed nation on July 22); the marquee outside a sold-out Madison Square Garden; Barack Obama’s summer playlist; the M.T.A.’s social media profile; a text thread with my mother; those colored note cards that announce “Saturday Night Live” hosts; the top of Metacritic’s list of the best-reviewed albums of 2024; and the headlines announcing the 2025 Grammys’ most nominated artists.
Since the June 7 release of her sixth studio album, 32-year-old Charli’s joyride to the center of popular culture has accelerated at an astounding velocity. Before this summer she was — as she put it on “I Might Say Something Stupid,” an understated, Auto-Tuned “Brat” confessional — “famous but not quite,” as in “perfect for the background, one foot in a normal life.” By the time Charli’s star-studded, expertly curated “Brat” remix album dropped on Oct. 11, she had some status updates, delivered with a signature plain-spoken shrug. “Oh [expletive],” she sang on a new version of the clubby “B2b.” “I kinda made it.”
Throughout the year, as Charli continued to release candid music about fame that only made her exponentially more famous, she seemed to approach stardom as a Warholian art project, the likes of which the pop world had not seen since early Lady Gaga. “You can play games with it,” she said of stardom (in another unexpected place, “The Howard Stern Show”), “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.”
The triumphant end point was a remix LP with a title poking fun at money-grabbing deluxe albums: “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.” The track list reads like a humblebrag about how many people want their names associated with Charli XCX in 2024: Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Julian Casablancas, Bon Iver. It is full of winking in-jokes, too, like sampling a bilingual voice note from the perpetually vacationing Dua Lipa on a Balearic house remix of “Talk Talk,” or assigning her friend the 1975 frontman Matty Healy a song called “I Might Say Something Stupid.” (Might?)
Things were completely different all right — but were they still brat? At the beginning of the summer, embracing the album and its accompanying aesthetic had the cachet of knowing some whispered password that granted entry into an exclusive, prohibitively cool club. But as Charli moved from pop culture’s side stages to its headlining gigs, some inconvenient questions began to linger. Like, what happens to a club when it’s way over capacity? At what point does the fire marshal arrive to commit the ultimate party foul?
TO APPRECIATE WHAT sets “Brat” apart, let’s rewind to Charli’s glossy 2022 LP, “Crash.” At the time, she playfully called it her “sellout,” “main pop girlie” album, and she tried to follow the conventional rules of contemporary hit-making: tight, frictionless couplets (“I want the bad ones ’cause they’re all I know / I always let the good ones go”), elaborate dance routines, prominent samples of classic house tracks. It worked well enough, but she wanted her next album to feel more authentic to her own reality.
“I really do feel like I’m saying things that I would say in private to friends,” she told Rolling Stone of writing “Brat.” “You would never actually say, ‘Me? I let the good ones go!’ We’d probably be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m a [expletive] mess. I keep falling for [expletive] idiot guys.”
“Brat” resonated more widely than any of Charli’s previous releases, in large part because it provided a potent alternative to some of pop music’s prevailing trends just at the moment audiences were beginning to tire of them. While recent albums from Dua Lipa, Grande and Lorde treated self-care and introspection as a kind of therapeutic salvation, Charli shifted hard into goblin mode, unfurling a litany of barely euphemistic drug references and proudly owning her messiest contradictions. (All three artists recognized the changing tides and hopped on Charli’s remixes.)
The pop star to whom Charli offers the clearest alternative, though, is Taylor Swift — who is almost certainly the subject of Charli’s scorching exorcism of insecurity, “Sympathy Is a Knife.” “I couldn’t even be her if I tried, I’m opposite, I’m on the other side,” Charli sings of a prominent peer who happened to be dating one of her boyfriend’s bandmates. (Charli’s fiancé George Daniel and Swift’s ex Healy are both in the 1975.)
Swift, who wrapped her record-breaking Eras Tour this year, has built a multibillion-dollar empire in part by convincing millions of fans that she could be their best friend. For anyone growing tired of her big-tent marketing savvy and cultural saturation, there was Charli, refreshingly unapproachable behind her omnipresent black sunglasses, name-dropping a slew of if-you-know-you-know mononyms in lyrics that feel like gossipy group chats: Sophie, George, A.G., HudMo, Gabbriette, Julia-a-a-a. In a year when Swift’s endlessly refreshed versions of her blockbuster 31-song album “The Tortured Poets Department” started to strike even her most devoted admirers as excessive, Charli turned abundance into something more artistic. The complete version of “Brat and It’s Completely Different” features more than 30 tracks, but it never felt repetitive or overly long.
Nostalgia for the flashiest, sloppiest, most unapologetically garish pop culture of Charli’s youth courses through “Brat”: the ubiquitous trucker hats of the early 2000s (“Von Dutch”), Harmony Korine’s debauched 2012 film “Spring Breakers” (a song of the same name that interpolates Britney Spears’s ballad “Everytime”). But there’s another unexpected set of references on its mood board: the Max’s Kansas City scene, Andy Warhol’s Factory and the musician that Charli has called “the greatest artist of all time”: Lou Reed.
“His lyrics are so conversational,” she told Stern. She said that she drew inspiration from the plain-spoken way Reed could create a musical snapshot of a scene; Jackie and Candy and Stephanie were to the Velvet Underground what Julia and George and Gabbriette are to Charli. That banana album cover? So brat.
CHARLOTTE AITCHISON’S MONIKER is an artifact from an earlier version of the internet: “Charli XCX” was her MSN messenger screen name. As an only child growing up in pastoral Essex, England, enamored of the glossy femme-pop of Spears and the Spice Girls — and emboldened by the recent, internet-fueled ascent of the sassy Londoner Lily Allen — Charli began recording her own demos and uploading them onto Myspace. Local promoters booked her for raves before she could legally drive there. Much to her embarrassment but eventual gratitude, her mum and dad chaperoned.
Charli’s mainstream breakthrough was supposed to happen at least a decade ago. She signed a development deal as a teenager, and in pop songwriting circles, she’d proven herself as someone who could craft a killer hook, even though her most recognizable hits furthered other artists’ careers. She gave Icona Pop “I Love It,” a song she’d dashed off in 30 minutes in a Swedish hotel room. She was responsible for the stickiest and least annoying parts of Iggy Azalea’s 2014 smash “Fancy.” Riding the momentum, that summer she had a Top 10 hit with the synth-pop tune “Boom Clap” from the soundtrack to “The Fault in Our Stars,” a song that was dreamy and achingly romantic but anodyne enough that she had originally offered it to Hilary Duff. The bold, pop-punk-tinged album “Sucker” arrived that December, but it failed to launch Charli as a solo star.
In response, Charli did some sonic self-discovery and found she liked taking risks, pushing limits and working with some of pop’s most experimental composers, like PC Music’s A.G. Cook and the hyperpop visionary Sophie. Her albums from this time revel in persona and artificiality, but they also didn’t center her as the main character the way a lot of more traditional pop music does. With their cadres of guest vocalists and co-signed upstarts, the track lists of releases like the 2017 creative high-water mark “Pop 2” and her 2019 album “Charli” are more like rap mixtapes than major-label pop albums.
In retrospect, she told Stern, she wasn’t quite ready for fame when “Sucker” came out, and it was a relief that she got more time to hone her vision outside of the brightest spotlight. “I wasn’t a fully formed artist at that point,” she said. “I was definitely moving in the right direction,” she added, “but I hadn’t compiled all of these parts of my art and put them through this funnel that made everything really potent.”
ON JULY 25, Pitchfork ran an obituary for Brat Summer. (“It was just over 80 days old.”) The death blow, according to the writer Arielle Gordon, was committed by Charli herself, when she posted to X in those heady early days of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, “kamala IS brat.” A chain reaction of cringe soon followed.
Pitchfork’s obituary turned out to be premature, though. Against all odds, Charli was able to extend her joyride a few more exits, refueled by the energy of her co-headlining Sweat Tour with Troye Sivan, the harmless novelty of the “Apple” social media dance craze and the sheer bulk of the remix album.
Brat Summer did finally run out of gas on Nov. 16, the night that Charli hosted and performed on “Saturday Night Live.” She was serviceably funny in most of her skits, but her musical performances failed to translate her appeal. Wearing a Reed T-shirt and a crescent bag as a party-girl prop, she sang “360” under the klieg lights of Studio 8H, her breathless vocals warbling in and out of Auto-Tune. The setting was more high-stakes than her clubby, anything-goes gigs attended by loyal fans. And even those gigs had begun to feel a little more like traditional pop star fare: The day after “S.N.L.,” Charli played a free live show in Times Square, sponsored by a symbol of disposable culture: the fast-fashion chain H&M.
If anything, Charli’s year of the “Brat” demonstrated how quickly the pop cultural life cycle moves now, and how easily the music industry can incorporate any outside agent into its own machinery. “I’m opposite, I’m on the other side,” Charli howled on “Saturday Night Live” during an anguished rendition of “Sympathy Is a Knife.” It was an impassioned and commendably abrasive performance, but the sentiment no longer rang as true as it had just six months ago. It’s no small feat to flip underdog appeal into superstardom. But Charli’s next act might present an even greater challenge — how to remain subversively cool inside pop culture’s molten core.
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