By Jules LeFevre
Charli XCX’s Brat: Texturally brash and genuinely affecting, the pop icon’s new album is a must-hear.Credit:
Charli XCX, Brat
We’re about three minutes into Charli XCX’s dizzying sixth studio album Brat when she states, for the record, “When I go to the club, I want to hear those club classics.” It arrives in the midst of a spiralling, pulverising beat supplied by her close friend and longtime collaborator, A. G. Cook.
The mix is almost overwhelming, as Charli runs through a roll-call of loved ones she wants to dance with: her boyfriend George (Daniel, of the 1975), Cook, and her late, great friend and producer Sophie. Charli just wants to dance and, luckily for her, everyone else does, too.
Brat arrives as the highly anticipated follow-up to Crash, the 2022 album on which the singer born Charlotte Aitchison shot for the charts (in her own way) with varying degrees of success. Crash marked the end of the five-album record deal she signed with Atlantic when she was just 16. Aitchison is 31 now, and the past decade-and-a-half is littered with sporadic commercial hits (After the Afterparty, Boom Clap, the Icona Pop collaboration I Love It) that sit alongside critically acclaimed, groundbreaking pop music like the Vroom Vroom and Pop 2 mixtapes. Those mixtapes – made alongside the visionary Sophie, who died in 2021 – still sound 20 years ahead of the curve.
Charli’s deep hatred of the major label system, of having her art and life dictated by a boardroom of faceless people, was public knowledge. She spoke of it often – sometimes in vague terms, often very bluntly. Her career has been defined by, among many things, the ferocious tension between commercial interests (and what that might look like if she embraced it, and whether she wants to) and the kind of pinballing freedom that enthralled her as a party-loving teenager in London.
Brat finds the now-31-year-old musing on fame, anxiety, insecurity and motherhood.Credit:
This context is important because it informs so much of Brat, the best album of her career. We knew what we were in for early on with the release of single Von Dutch, an acidic, warping track that feels like a fishhook in the guts. Then there were the must-get-into Partygirl raves she threw (the first Brooklyn Boiler Room party got more than 25,000 RSVPs). Then came 360, the second single and album opener, on which Charli declared, “I’m your favourite reference, baby”; the accompanying video featured a roll-call of It Girls including Julia Fox and Chloë Sevigny.
Brat, the spiritual successor to Pop 2, is an album born from, and destined for, the dark, sticky clubs Charli so desperately loves. Tracks like Club Classics, Mean Girls and standout Sympathy Is a Knife are full of the serrated, twisted production she’s helped pioneer.
On Sympathy Is a Knife she looks for reflection and refraction in a famous pop star that hangs backstage at her boyfriend’s show (IYKYK). Rewind, with its puncturing synths, seems to pick up where the 2018 track 1999 left off. Brat’s textural brashness feels totally refreshing in a pop landscape of relentless disco-lite polish.
But, like any late-night masterpiece, Brat is genuinely affecting. Charli unravels her feelings about fame, anxiety, insecurity, motherhood and her relationships in a candid and touching way. Its most emotional moment comes halfway through: So I is a crushing, grief-stricken tribute to Sophie, Charli anguished as she regrets having pushed the producer away. “I know you always said it’s OK to cry,” she sings, referencing Sophie’s 2018 song, “so I know I can cry, I can cry, so I cry.”
Hand-wringing over whether Charli sits as an underground artist or mainstream pop act fade into the background on Brat because why does it matter? Brat is the sound of an artist making the music they want to hear themselves. It sounds bleedingly obvious, but it’s also completely revitalising.
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