‘I was truly, genuinely OK with it not being successful’: how Charli XCX made Brat
Pop’s biggest underdog broke through in 2024 with the release of Brat — the biggest (and many say best) album of the year. How did Charli XCX do it?
Nine minutes before I was scheduled to interview Charli XCX about her album Brat, which has been inescapable since it was released in June, the British artist announced that the biggest era of her career was officially over.
“Goodbye forever brat summer,” she wrote on X. It was September, so, technically, this made sense; the northern hemisphere summer was complete. Here in Australia we’ve been patiently biding our time, and come February 2025 the movement that started with slime-green memes and culminated in “demo(brat)” endorsements from Vice President Kamala Harris will finally reach our shores when Charli XCX headlines the touring Laneway Festival.
The seasons may be changing, but nobody is saying goodbye to Charli XCX. When her 21-city Sweat tour of North America accompanied by West Australian Troye Sivan – the blond-haired, blue-eyed Ken to her Weird Barbie – stopped at Madison Square Garden in late September, Addison Rae and Lorde made guest appearances. So did the inventor of the “Apple” dance, a viral TikTok routine set to Charli’s song of the same name. Cheering from the audience were Chloë Sevigny, Emily Ratajkowski, Andy Cohen, Marc Jacobs and Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff. Brat summer felt very much alive and proudly unwell. Her remix album, featuring Ariana Grande, Tinashe and Bon Iver, dropped in October.
“I’ve always been anti this idea that once an album comes out, that’s its peak,” Charli, 32, says over lunch in Los Angeles. “I feel like there are so many more possibilities of what those songs can become.”
She’s dressed in a grey shirt with raw edges tied in a knot at her waist, plus oversized grey denim shorts and high-heel black leather boots. Her signature large black sunglasses, evoking her origins in London’s underground rave scene, rest on the crown of her curly jet-black mane, which is tied up in a loose bun. She appears to be wearing little to no makeup, maybe a nude lip gloss. After placing her black Loewe Puzzle bag on her lap, she proceeds to order the messiest, most decadent double cheeseburger I have ever seen, with melted cheese spilling over the side into a pool of bordelaise sauce.
She has just flown back to LA from what was supposed to be a vacation with her fiancé George Daniel, drummer for The 1975. Being the true “365 party girl” that she is, though, she was up until 4am every night in Sicily working on remixes with collaborators back in LA.
The past few months have been a lot, and in a good way. Before Brat, her sixth studio album, she was “famous, but not quite”, as she sings on I Might Say Something Stupid. Born Charlotte Emma Aitchison to an Indian mother and a Scottish father, she began posting songs on MySpace in 2008 and playing warehouse shows as a teenager. (The “XCX” refers to her MSN screen name.) In the 2010s, after signing a record deal, she went from putting out niche club music to more eardrum-friendly hits, collaborating with Icona Pop and Australian rapper Iggy Azalea. But she never quite had a thoroughly mainstream moment until Brat.
The album is a middle finger to expectations of her as a person and an artist. Its brashness resonated with audiences after such an extended period of playing it safe, and following world tours from two of music’s most polished pop stars: Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. It makes the case that niceness is not only boring but also dishonest. We’re all riddled with faults, insecurities and contradictions – and that’s cool. Charli is a club rat through and through. But also, maybe she wants to get married and have a really cute kid one day, you know?
“Twenty-year-olds love Brat. But when I listen to the music, I’m like, ‘My God, these are lyrics about my day, like the many things that I go through as a woman in her thirties’,” says model and actress Ratajkowski. The two have been friends since they met at a fashion show a couple of years ago.
In the US in July, when the Democrats decided to go against convention themselves, Brat suddenly went from being a #mood to a symbol. It started with a characteristically unserious Charli tweet: “kamala IS brat,” she wrote, after President Biden announced he was withdrawing from the race. Then Brat – and its intentionally garish green – was everywhere. My mum suddenly knew who Charli XCX was. By August, Barack Obama had listed 365 on his annual summer playlist.
When Charli XCX originally pitched Brat to executives at Atlantic Records, she came prepared with a lengthy document detailing its rollout “campaign”.
Her longtime stylist, Chris Horan, says mood-boarding alone for the brat aesthetic took something like three months. He describes it as “bitchy” and “sexy, [but] slightly off.” After Crash, her previous studio album, which she then characterized as an example of her “selling out,” she told Horan that she wanted an entirely new wardrobe that felt “adult.”
“I really had this very concise, strong and strict vision for what it was and how I wanted to work,” Charli says of brat. “I also was truly, genuinely OK with it not being successful. When I started making the record, I was telling everyone around me: ‘This is going to be a record with no sacrifices.’ I remember telling the label: ‘You’re probably not going to feel like there are any hits on this record, but that’s just what it is.’ ”
A Grammy would be nice - she has been nominated for seven of them ahead of February’s ceremony - but she has felt snubbed before, so she’s not counting on it. She knew from the beginning that she was going to do a remix album. It represents everything that has gotten her to where she is today: her ability to be savvy and spontaneous, to bring together a crowd of friends and frenemies (like Swift) and to fuel the conversation while acting above it. Songs like I Think About it All The Time, about her good friend having a baby, and Girl, So Confusing, about her non-friendship friendship with Lorde, give us a glimpse of Charli’s wounded, more fragile side. “Sometimes I think you might hate me,” she sings on the latter. “Sometimes I think I might hate you.” But then they “work[ed] it out on the remix”, as Lorde says, through text messages and voice notes that eventually became another hit single.
The new, remixed version of Brat has the same radioactive-looking green cover as the original, only the text is flipped backward, as though held up to a mirror. On it, Charli’s work is deconstructed (she fears the word “remix” sounds boring) and put back together again with the likes of Bon Iver, Julian Casablancas, The 1975, Billie Eilish and Grande – a roster that’s both varied and, as the kids say, a real flex.
“I can tell that this record has really spoken to people because everyone’s available now, whereas in the past it’s been like, ‘She’d love to but...’ You know, all of the excuses that you give to someone when you don’t actually want to do it,” Charli says about no one in particular with a satisfied smirk. “I look at this group of artists, and I’m like, ‘F..king hell!’”
Fans assumed Charli would also “work it out on the remix” with Swift. (If Swift represents the ultimate BFF, with her squad and all the friendship bracelets at her shows, Charli and her “angels” are the “mean girls” as she calls them on her Brat anthem of the same name. “It’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl,” all of Madison Square Garden screamed cathartically as Charli and Lorde stomped down the stage in matching Saint Laurent outfits.)
By now, Brat has lived and died so manytimes over in the cultural conversation that it’s hard to imagine how much longer Charli can keep this up. “I would want to do something so not in this world that I think I need to kind of give myself a bit of time to be able to figure out what that is,” she says when I ask her about the possibility of another album.
She was cast in Faces of Death, a remake of the 1978 horror cult classic. Charli says she was “terrified to be on set – to be so out of control”. And then she “got the bug”. This summer, she went to Poland to work (and party) with the playwright, producer and fellow actor Jeremy O. Harris on a more experimental project directed by Pete Ohs, which the cast and director wrote and filmed on location. Charli was also cast alongside Olivia Wilde in the upcoming erotic thriller I Want Your Sex by Gregg Araki, whose trippy Smiley Face (2007) opening credits inspired the Brat album cover.
“Now that I’ve made this record that more and more people seem to have connected with, I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t want to do that,’” Charli says. “Now I want to go and do something completely different.” But isn’t it exhausting? “I like the pace of the world right now,” she says. “I actually do. It’s like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.”
At her Madison Square Garden show, the energy was high. “I actually hate going to shows,” she told me. She gets bored; she’d rather watch a DJ in a club. So she and Sivan worked to make the Sweat tour feel as much like a small venue as possible. Her stage presence was aggressive and explosive; she licked the floor and flashed her underwear and stomped around like a swaggering drunk, her designer feather coat falling off her shoulder. She crawled underneath the set and slinked around suggestively in a metal cage. Toward the end, I turned to my friend and said (with admiration) that she looked like Samara in The Ring. After it was over, thousands of mini brats filed out of the arena, some wearing white tank tops that looked to be doused in red wine in reference to the 360 music video.
“Where should we go after this?” Sivan asked Charli as they walked offstage. She knows where the after-party is. “But we’re not telling you!”
Charli XCX plays the Laneway Festival in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, February 8-15. lanewayfestival.com
