“BRAT” – Charli XCX
★★★★★
Top Picks: “Club classics,” “Sympathy is a knife,” “Talk talk“
Similar Artists: RAYE, Kim Petras, Kylie Minogue
Following a two-year creation period, Charli XCX has followed up CRASH with her sixth studio album BRAT. The singer and her team teased the project all over the world. From green walls and pop-up performances, to memes, to iconic profile photo takeovers, BRAT was inescapable, and the album truly lived up to its hype.
Charli XCX is known, at least lately, as a club rat DJ. She is often seen in a booth at clubs, or mixing at iconic venues like the boiler room. She has a grasp on social media like no other, proven through the virality of her Addison Rae remix of “Von Dutch,” the album’s lead single. BRAT is grounded in club life, online identities, and Charli’s own struggles and perspectives. It’s a project for the masses to dance to, sure, but it’s also an introspective, candid look into Charli as an artist and a person.
The album opener “360” sets the mood for the whole project. With direct references to pop-culture icons like Julia Fox (“I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia”), a modulated vocal, bouncing synth riffs, and fun adlibs, we know immediately where this is headed. The track also has the iconic line “That city sewer slut’s the vibe,” which is, undoubtedly, the motto for the album as a whole.
BRAT is filled with upbeat, electronic hits meant for a club. “Club Classics” boasts a spliced background vocal, an 80s-style synth in the pre, and a catchy, repetitive chorus. Charli speaks of dancing to the morning light with a wobbling backing instrumental that feels trance-like. “Sympathy is a knife” opens with a hard-hitting beat and a dry vocal. The track builds and builds to a chorus that soars wide open. With swells, a reverbed vocal, and clapping hi-hats, it’s almost impossible not to hear the crowds that will surely scream along to the song.
The trend of club hits continues with the aforementioned “Von Dutch” and “Everything is romantic.” “Von Dutch” is likely the most notable single to come from the album rollout efforts. As the lead single, the track gained much attention online as speculation about a new album grew. With a memorable remix from Addison Rae, the song went certifiably viral, and its catchy chorus sat in the back of the world’s mind for weeks. “Everything is romantic” grows from an orchestral arrangement in a style reminiscent of RAYE. The track can be best described as busy but in the most positive way. “Everything is romantic” takes the traditional romantic arrangement and turns it on its head with a glitchy, pulsing beat and a repetitive lyric. The outro consists of a fade out and the lyric “Fall in love again and again” over and over. While the words are simple, the instrumental is anything but, and it’s a doozy that you can’t help coming back to.
While the album is stuffed with club hits, the upbeat, dance-worthy tracks are not the only aspect of this project. Throughout BRAT, Charli XCX weaves some of her most poignant, soul-bearing tracks. With honest lyrics describing the difficulties of spending time around other celebrities, “I might say something” is the first introduction to this soul-bearing, and “Rewind” delves into the new pressures Charli feels surrounding numbers and charts and how media attention has changed her self-image. However, “I think about it all the time” may be Charli’s most introspective track ever. With a dive head-first into her fears about the restrictions her career puts on her personal life, Charli explores the “what-ifs” that she sees being lived out by friends around her. She speaks of her friends having children and realizing that they now know things that she doesn’t. She speaks of the existential crisis that comes with a career in the music industry and the possibility of working until it’s “too late” to have children, which might taint the memories of her current freedom. The track is gut-wrenching, raw, and the deepest thoughts every working woman has had at least once in her life.
To complete the trifecta of bangers and soul-bearing tracks, BRAT boasts a notable amount of referential moments—both to Charli herself and other stars. The most harrowing of these tracks is “So I.” The song is an ode to the late SOPHIE, a pioneer in dance pop and a long-time collaborator and friend of Charli. The track ruminates on the could haves before SOPHIE’s passing, and it speaks of the regrets Charli has from moments when she could have seen her friend just once more. It’s sorrowful, but the track is also healing. Charli asserts, time after time, that “it’s okay to cry.” To the listener, this feels just as much about reassurance as it does about regret.
However, the referential tracks are often more antagonistic throughout BRAT, with numerous tracks pointing to feuds and bad blood. “Sympathy is a knife” is a track about self-comparison to giants in the industry. Charli speaks of a specific girl she knows she’ll never compare to no matter how hard she tries, and fans have speculated this woman may be music industry superstar Taylor Swift. While the track is fun and danceable, the lyrics speak of Charli’s desire to die after facing feelings of insecurity and unworthiness. It lays Charli’s deepest thoughts bare for the world to see, and it has built the framework for gossip to run rampant. The most obvious and vengeful of these referential tracks, though, is “Girl, so confusing.” The track details Charli’s difficulties with another player in the music industry—one that she is often compared to—which many believe to be the singer-songwriter Lorde. Charli discusses feeling like this artist wants to see her “falling over and failing,” and that they’re inauthentic with their friendliness. The track also identifies Charli’s feelings of otherness within the music industry—a recurring theme throughout the entirety of BRAT.
The drama comes to a head with self-referential digs. “Mean girls” is a track discussing the sterotypical mean girls of modern society, based on Dasha Nekrasova, yet it draws parallels between these girls and Charli herself. The whole song is basically Charli admitting that the world sees her as the archetype of a mean girl, but owning up to it. The song goes out to all of her fellow “mean girls.” Yet, it also discusses how Charli feels different from the sterotypical popstars of modern times, and it details her struggles with feeling unworthy in the face of this insecurity. Once again, Charli XCX’s lyrics are cutting and raw in their descriptions and emotionality.
BRAT is otherworldly. In a time when pop singer-songwriters want to put out the next fun, indie hit, Charli XCX has reverted back to the club hits of the early 2010s. The project is quirky, moody, and authentic. It’s a trophy for danceable hyper-pop music. Charli XCX has many phenomenal projects, but BRAT easily takes the spot as the best. With nothing but smash hits, BRAT is the album of the summer.
See Charli XCX live on upcoming “Sweat” tour, co-headlining with Troye Sivan. Get tickets here.