Change the record: Charli XCX – Brat

Now, I’ve never been one to cover things on time. I’m always, at the very least, a few weeks late to the party when it comes to covering albums. But this review might seem extreme– it’s not just a few weeks late; it’s nearly half a year late. You might be wondering why I’m covering this album now. The reason, dear reader, is that I’ve developed a newfound cultural context for it after the election. Yes, this review, written right after the one discussing the Israel/Palestine conflict, is now focusing on the election. I’ve been hitting all the fun topics recently. Truly, though, I do think something is interesting to investigate here now that the dust has settled politically–and I’ll even throw in an album review while I’m at it.

“Brat” is the sixth album by British electronic pop star Charli XCX, and her first release was with Atlantic Records after 2022’s “Crash.” That album boasted great sales but pretty mild critical success and left Charli herself dissatisfied. Personally, I found “Crash” to be one of 2022’s bigger disappointments: a more commercial, less interesting album despite Charli consistently being one of the more cutting-edge and—as much as I hate saying this—futuristic pop artists in the scene. More than any other pop artist–or, hell, more than most artists in general–Charli is one of the most ambitious artists worth watching, release after release, from her experiments with bubblegum bass produced by the dearly departed Sophie to her wild, experimental and bizarre “Charli” record from 2019. From her COVID lockdown hyperpop jams on “How I’m Feeling Now” to the absolutely impeachable electro-pop bangers on “Pop 2,” she’s constantly reinventing herself from album to album. Few other musicians in her level of popularity and public attention are even a fraction as ambitious and unique as she is.

With all that in mind, and despite “Crash’s” lukewarm response, there was an outpouring of hype for her brand-new 2024 album “Brat.” Even with one of the most bizarre covers of any album this year, especially for a mainstream pop artist, “Brat” promised to be the complete opposite of “Crash.” Instead of mainstream sellout pop, it’d be an experimental throwback to 1990s and 2000s club music, with influence from all over the board thrown into the mixing pot. Ironically, it outsold her mainstream pop sellout album by a wide margin. 

The album’s first single, the absolutely perfect “Von Dutch,” immediately skyrocketed to being one of my favorite songs of the year. An infectious and braggadocious electronic pop banger, it features rocking synths, swaggery drums, and vocal effects that somehow make it all the better. I’ll admit–I’m jealous of how good it is. 

The next single, the album opener “360,” features stark plinky synths, deep boomy synths, and drums that are basically just clapping. I was divisive about it at first. But as its earworm of a chorus embedded itself into my skull more and more, I realized just how well made and amazing it was, with one of the most fun music videos of the year to boot. 

The final single, released about a month after the album debuted, was “Apple.” With its bouncy and fruit-flavored instrumental and catchy broken record chorus, the track provides an unfitting but undeniably infectious backdrop to Charli’s lyrics. Singing about generational trauma and the complicated relationship she has with her parents and family as a whole, Charli also brings up the ever-present theme of her anxiety over having children throughout the album. Most notably present on the bare and skeletally intimate “I Think About It All The Time,” which has some pitter-pattering drum machine hits playing over a repeating set of synth notes, as Charli muses on her uncertainty going into something as overall life-changing as having a child.

Charli’s anxieties are present all over the album. In the swooshing and gorgeous club banger “Girl, So Confusing,” she sings about her complicated relationship with another pop singer (Lorde) and possibly projects her toxicities and negative emotions onto her, all over these fantastically ugly synths which underline the complicated headspace it has left her in. Meanwhile, in the moody ballad interlude, “I Might Say Something Stupid,” she bemoans her social nervousness and insecurities over Gesaffelstein’s usual brand of dystopian-sounding synths. (Man, I call things dystopian a lot; maybe that’s just the 2020s getting to me). 

This shows “Brat” as an album of halves, both weirdly connected by Charli’s party lifestyle–the ups and the downs. Either you’re having a great rambunctious time with your buds, enjoying the music, and getting wasted, or you’re sitting in the corner with an empty red solo cup while the DJ is playing the music too loud actually to start a conversation, leaving you to scroll through your phone the whole time. This is well emphasized in the breakup-styled “B2B”, where she uses DJ slang to describe anxieties over a failed relationship, following right into “Mean Girls,” a dancefloor rager produced by Hudson Mohawke (yes, seriously, the “CBAT” guy) dedicated to all of the drunk-party-for-life succubitches out there.

This hedonistic, bleak yet fun atmosphere permeates the whole album, from the minor key bop “Rewind” to the blunt and brutally honest “Sympathy Is A Knife” and even the sad-girl summer pop jam “Talk Talk.” Among the remaining tracks, one standout is the sporadic and spastic mini opus of “Everything Is Romantic,” which wildly shifts back and forth between the chaotic club hits and the beautiful, soaring synth waves. Another highlight is “So I,” a tragic and touching pop tribute to Charli’s number one collaborator and, more importantly, close friend, Sophie, dripping with emotion and passion for her life’s work.  Finally, the album closes with “365,” the perfect musical representation of the hungover morning after a club binge. It completely warps and sours the bubbly “360” into a harsh electronic rocker, feeling like a chaotic headache that I truly love.

If you couldn’t tell, I really, really liked this album. It’s not only one of the best pop albums of the year but also one of the best albums overall, with honest and open lyrics, creative and gorgeous production, and some of the most compelling vocal performances and beats of the year. It’s clear why it became Charli’s big mainstream breakthrough and her biggest critical success to date. It’s yet another sign that, no matter what any ‘things-were-better-in-my-day’ fart might say, pop music continues to innovate and impress.

With the review complete, I think I should wrap this all around to the opening spiel and talk about how this personal collection of tracks connects to the election.  Brat was openly supported and co-opted by the Kamala Harris campaign, possibly out of genuine enjoyment and possibly out of the somewhat galling notion that parading around a popular album amongst Gen Z teenagers would garner more support from those very people for the campaign. In a way, it was a telling reflection of why the campaign failed to some extent—it felt hollow; it was co-opting the aesthetics of the album without considering what it represented to the artist or the people who connected with the music. 

It also shows a continual lack of effort from a campaign that is more focused on connecting through pop culture than actually trying to connect with young audiences on social problems they care about. It’s a shame, but looking back on it, this felt doomed to fail because conservatives were already fully on board with dumb things that spewed out of that ogre’s face, and all we could do to fight back was try and party our way to some kind of victory, hoping it’d somehow get people to join in with the dance. Sorry for such a bleak ending, but hey, at least you can take solace in the fact that we still have music like “Brat,” right? We may lose all of our rights, our homes, and our money, but as long as we can dance the night away, maybe the apocalypse could be worse.