On Brat, Charli xcx’s zeitgeist-lassoing sixth album, its creator brooded on her chronically underrated status. Over the sickly sweet deconstructed UK garage of Rewind, she worried about her lack of presence on the Billboard charts, unsure “whether I think I deserve commercial success”. During the jagged synthpop of Sympathy Is a Knife she bristled under the pitying gaze of a megastar peer. On electro dirge I Might Say Something Stupid, she described herself as “famous but not quite”.
The agony and ecstasy of the sub-mainstream pop star proved an incredibly rich seam. Brat mussed up Charli’s cult sound – a harsh and excessively artificial strain of dance-pop – and paired it with lyrics that ricocheted between euphoric swagger and eye-wateringly candid vulnerability. It was so rich, in fact, that the concept cancelled itself out. Brat, which hit No 3 hit on the US chart when it was released in June, became a bona fide commercial hit and a cultural juggernaut – thanks in part to an ingeniously meme-friendly marketing campaign (its cut-through best exemplified by the Kamala Harris campaign co-opting the artwork). It elevated the 32-year-old to the celebrity firmament and, more importantly, shifted pop’s Overton window to a more futuristic, experimental space.
While riding this wave of publicity and adoration, Charli has somehow found time to capitalise on it with a remix album, named with the same wryly under-crafted sensibility that defined Brat’s lyrics. Brat And It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat isn’t simply a slightly jazzed-up version of the original record; as per the title, many tracks have had a complete overhaul. It’s even more thrilling than Brat 1.0 – not because it’s an objective improvement (although it is often more subtle and sophisticated and, occasionally, more gratifyingly brutal) – but because it offers undeniable proof that Charli and her collaborators, foremost among them producer AG Cook, are in their imperial phase: they’ve got ideas coming out of their ears, and they’re all good ones.
The creative peaks of this career high come thick and fast. A new version of Club Classics cannibalises two other tracks – 365 and B2B – while chipmunking Charli’s vocals and clanging like a malfunctioning computer program in a throwback to the early output of Cook’s cult label PC Music. Yung Lean and Robyn bring oddball braggadocio to 360. Caroline Polachek transforms Everything Is Romantic into exquisitely atmospheric, streetlamp-lit electronica via muttered sprechgesang about drizzly London mundanity. And Lorde brings thrillingly meta, body image-based frankness to Girl, So Confusing (a song that originally implicated her as a potential frenemy).
Big name guests – Bon Iver gilding I Think About It All the Time with glitchy soul; Julian Casablancas providing Mean Girls with throwback indie sleaze – fumble with Charli’s trademark sound in a way that is sometimes jarring but always interesting. Still, the real draw remains the interplay between offbeat, flamboyantly synthetic electropop and Charli’s droll soul-bearing.
She hasn’t stopped: in an unexpectedly ballsy move, Charli is now spitballing about her steep ascent. B2B strips out its snap-squelch bassline to make room for a stream-of-consciousness monologue about her new life (she’s “fucking tired”, which might mean: “Oh shit, I’ve kind of made it”), and Sympathy Is a Knife bemoans the downsides of wild success: friends saying you’ve changed, people eagerly anticipating your downfall. As a musician (and as a person), Charli doesn’t exactly radiate warmth, but her arrogance is always tempered by highly relatable self-loathing – a nuance that Ariana Grande’s contribution to Sympathy Is a Knife spectacularly fails to heed: “It’s a knife when you’re so pretty they think it must be fake”. On Rewind, now rebooted as a nostalgia trip for the pre-Brat days, Charli laments the ugly, hollow impulses stardom encourages: “Wanna see my face all up in the press / When I don’t sometimes I get a little depressed.”
In one sense, this is a victory lap: Charli is a self-proclaimed party girl and judging by the guest list (other collaborators include Billie Eilish, Troye Sivan and the 1975) this transcendently fun and cool collection is the year’s hottest ticket. In another, however, it’s a glimpse into celebrity’s heart of darkness. Having all your dreams come true is famously not all it’s cracked up to be – but, for the sake of pop music’s progress, it’s a good job Charli xcx got the chance to find out for herself.
• This review was amended on 11 October 2024. Robyn and Yung Lean appear on the remix of 360, not 365 as previously stated.
