By Robert Moran
Brat summer gets reinterpreted through the looking glass on Charli XCX’s stunning new remix album.
Charli XCX, Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat
Pity anyone who prematurely sounded the end of Brat summer. They clearly didn’t contemplate what Charli XCX could do with a remix album.
As its title suggests, this isn’t the sort of throwaway deluxe treatment that’s become standard in the streaming era, those cynical ploys to delay an album’s dwindling sunset. This is a whole new album, Brat reinterpreted from the other side of the looking glass. Call it Brat (Charli’s Version).
More reality check than victory lap, it’s a remarkable in-the-moment reevaluation of the phenomenon that was Brat summer, using remix culture’s knack for recontextualising to lend new moods and meanings to Brat’s already beloved classics. The paranoiac Sympathy is a Knife, with its central megastar now twisted from them to I, gets to the heart: “It’s a knife when you’re finally on top, ’cause logically the next step is they wanna see you fall to the bottom,” Charli sings.
Brutally honest but it’s savvy self-mythologising too, enforcing Charli’s key conflict: that push-pull complexity that’s been central to her pop-making muse. Brat might’ve been an unprecedented smash for the artist, but she has previously felt the mainstream’s embrace (if not with such exuberant control). She had it in her Sucker-era (2014), with the chart-topping success of Fancy and Boom Clap, and she had it with Crash (2022), her “sellout album” that became her most commercially successful release and her debut number one in Australia. After both times, Charli retreated to the underground, decrying major label mechanics and the emptiness of mainstream fame. Now – incredibly, within the space of the same album cycle – the pendulum’s swung again.
Not just a display of her prodigious talents for curation (the features here – including an uncredited Dua Lipa, and an Easter egg-inducing collab with Julian Casablancas – rival Pop 2), the remix album also reflects Charli’s unequalled engagement with pop. She gives space here to figures grappling with their own misgivings with pop fame, and allows them to be as radically vulnerable as she was on Brat. Lorde’s verse on Girl So Confusing, already pop’s most vital moment of 2024, may have been the impetus, but now everyone gets an opportunity to work it out on the remix.
Reality check and victory lap: Charli XCX reflects on the unprecedented success of Brat.
Ariana Grande, herself a victim of scrutiny around her relationships and her appearance, does it on Sympathy is a Knife: “It’s a knife when you’re so pretty they think it must be fake/ it’s a knife when they dissect your body on the front page,” she sings, getting some fluttery adlibs off amid the grinding synths. Matty Healy of the 1975, who’s been missing from the public eye since being dragged into Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets lament, drops in on an ambient reworking of I Might Say Something Stupid with English producer Jon Hopkins: “Rot in my house in L.A., thinking of giving up everything/ Now I’m watching what I say, these interviews are so serious,” he sings. It’s Charli giving voice to the nightmare of pop ubiquity.
On a reworked Everything is Romantic, Caroline Polachek picks up Charli’s evocative flow to reveal the singer’s been calling her hungover from photo shoots overseas, complaining that she feels “smothered by logistics” (“It’s like you’re living the dream, but you’rе not living your life,” Polachek tells her). On the once upbeat and naive Rewind, now reshaped with the saddest synth wobbles, Charli – alongside Drain Gang hero Bladee – rearticulates the skewed ambition of the original track from the other side of commercial success: “Wanna see my face all up in the press, when I don’t sometimes I get a little depressed”.
Some have called the remix album Brat summer’s comedown, but Charli finds room to flaunt. A bawdy remix of Talk Talk with Troye Sivan (co-produced by Aussie Styalz Fuego) and Club Classics with Spanish rapper BB Trickz go hard, beats pummelling to gabber levels, as does the Von Dutch remix, with Addison Rae’s piercing scream already a viral calling card. So I, Charli’s emotional tribute to her late collaborator Sophie, is reframed in a celebratory context (“Now I wanna think about all the good times,” Charli starts), even if AG Cook’s unhinged metallic clang builds to a heart-shredding climax.
The paradox of Brat is that it was supposed to be Charli’s retreat to her own milieu after the conceptual (but soul-sucking) success that was Crash; instead the world suddenly caught up to her idiosyncratic bent. That she’s hinted she’ll now step away from music and towards acting instead – “what would Chloe Sevigny do?” as she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe – suggests an understanding that there are now few musical refuges left for her where the masses won’t follow. Pushing pop away entirely when you’ve finally remodelled it in your image? That’s pretty Brat. But as a final testament to the year’s reigning pop phenomenon, this is stunning.
To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.