As Fall Approaches, Brat Summer Readies Its Exit

It takes a certain je ne sais quoi to be the driving force of a cultural moment and having your album cycle’s visuals co-opted by every brand, organization and Trader Joe’s chalk art in the West. The age of monoculture has become fleeting over the past 10 years, as state-of-the-art social media algorithms have turned the wet dreams of shareholders into reality. Not only does this reality incentivize artists to extract their niche from the context of elemental consumer culture they feel would best accompany their music, but it also requires a self-awareness and internet savviness that not everyone wields. So what happens when that new status quo is flipped on its head, spit on and satirized? The green tinge of the dollar bill becomes neon and fluorescent.

Charli xcx’s BRAT has become the most critically acclaimed album of the year thus far (it has a Metascore of 95, four points higher than the next closest mainstream album, COWBOY CARTER), and just two months removed from its release, it has already become a defining moment in Charli’s 15+ year long career. BRAT is the culmination of several years of passion, dedication and artistry that could truly not be pulled off by any other artist. Charli says it herself on the opening line of the record: “I went my own way and I made it.”

A 14 year-old Charlotte Atchinson begged her parents to loan her money to record an album, which she aptly titled 14 and never properly released. Her teenage years were spent posting demos to MySpace and performing at illegal warehouse raves in London. Her roots are grounded in haze-inducing strobes and people in the bathroom, as she succinctly puts it, “bumpin’ that.” Now at 32, she has seemingly come full circle, playing boiler room sets in Ibiza, Brooklyn and London with BRAT’s vital players (fiancé and muse George Daniel, producers AG Cook and Eazyfun) alongside her.

Up until the BRAT album cycle, much of the general public still only knew Charli xcx as the voice behind her 2014 hits (Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” and “Boom Clap”), only one of which she is credited as the main artist on. “What the fuck!? I thought this fucking song was big in Germany,” she yelled in frustration to an unenthused 2013 Melt festival crowd. Charli’s stardom was precarious and, at times, outrunning her. She was 21 then, working with some of the industry’s biggest names—on tracks written both for other artists and her sophomore record SUCKER, the creative hands of Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend, Frank Ocean, HAIM), Ariel Rechtshaid (Adele, Sky Ferriera, Carly Rae Jepsen), Benny Blanco (Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, Rihanna) and Rivers Cuomo of Weezer. Cuomo in particular seemed to inspire Charli the most, as she gushed about their time in the studio together in a now archived interview with DIY.

The track “Hanging Around” from SUCKER was cited to be directly inspired by Weezer’s 2005 hit “Beverly Hills,” which seemed to align with her M.O. at the time: She wanted to be this brash, feminist figure, albeit boxed within the restrictions that lie in pop stardom. Ultimately, this landed her in the good graces of Tumblr while the site was in its heyday. She wrote SUCKER for “everyone on the planet with a pussy.” While the record didn’t quite hit the mark for the general public, the devout, cult fanbase she’d garner from being a Tumblr “It Girl” granted her an asset that would long follow her.

Charli xcx had a legion of people that would go to bat for her when prompted, and this isn’t unique to just her. The artists that Tumblr users would wax poetic (and write copious amounts of fan-fiction) about would ultimately become some of the biggest names of the streaming age: Lana Del Ray, Arctic Monkeys, Troye Sivan and The 1975 would arguably not be where they are today if not for that initial Tumblr-led cult following they found. Charli in particular, though, was in the right place at the right time in a way that would inhibit the setup and payoff that would inevitably span throughout the next decade of her career. Knowing the internet and having the backing of the internet is an invaluable asset, even if nobody knew to what extent at the time.

In 2015, Charli xcx’s then-boyfriend Huck Kwong put her on up-and-coming UK producer SOPHIE, who she’d enlist to help her make her initially misunderstood 2016 EP Vroom Vroom. The lyrics on the EP are sassy, narcissistic and braggadocious in a candor that would become synonymous with much of Charli’s discography going forward. It was (and still is) quite taboo for female artists to be boastful in their music, as it continues to be considered by many as “unladylike.” Charli doubled down on the persona she was creating: “Bitches know they can’t catch me / Cute, sexy, and my ride’s sporty” she raps over a garish beat complete with a driving, futuristic synth bassline. The rapped verses of Vroom Vroom’s title track are industrial, brash, unforgiving and whiplash-inducing, but before you can even process it, Charli’s upper register is delivering a sugary-sweet, earwormy pop hook accompanied by MIDI glockenspiel, snaps drowned in reverb and a much gentler bassline. The track—and SOPHIE’s production prowess as a whole—became so seminal to pop music that it caused Pitchfork to retcon their initial negative review of the EP.

SOPHIE’s approach to making music, and the cult of celebrity, left a significant and lasting impact on Charli xcx. The ethos of PC Music, the label/creative collective founded by BRAT’s primary producer A.G. Cook in 2013, promotes disregard to commercialism and commercial viability. However, this is not to be confused with a complete dismissal of consumerism. In her profile with Vulture, SOPHIE explained that “if you can do two things with it [music], give it meaning for yourself according to the perspectives you want to share and also have it function on the mass market, and therefore expose your message to more people in a less elitist context, then that is an ideal place to be. An experimental idea doesn’t have to be separated from a mainstream context. The really exciting thing is where those two things are together. That’s where you can get real change.” Experimentation and authenticity should not always have to be inaccessible, and that’s the cause that SOPHIE championed with her music and production throughout her tragically short life. This sentiment is what BRAT became, as it continued to find its way to new listeners and found Charli in a career renaissance. The stream of consciousness absurdity of “I think about it all the time” does not exist on a charting album without the philosophies that SOPHIE championed and instilled onto those she worked with.

Charli xcx’s consistent collaborations with the PC music camp in the years following Vroom Vroom have allowed her to nurture avant-garde pop soundscapes near the precipice of the mainstream while simultaneously impressing critics and lifting up her peers. The cancellation of her third studio album after getting leaked online really ended up being a blessing in disguise. What she’d return with was a complete and utter paradigm shift. Charli’s career is split into two time periods: before Pop 2 and after Pop 2. That mixtape and Charli, the album that followed it, featured a litany of collaborations from the likes of Caroline Polachek, Dorian Electra and Clairo during times where they were experiencing vital turning points of their own careers.

More than five years out from those releases, Charli xcx’s influence on pop music has begun to meet the current moment where it’s at without forgoing her signature penchant for experimentation, garishness and bombast. The pop landscape is returning to a place where excess is celebrated, as opposed to the understated melancholia of the front-half of this decade (à la Phoebe Bridgers and her legion of soundalikes/contemporaries finding themselves sprinkled throughout Spotify’s editorial playlists). The tide is turning, and it’s up to the rest of the pop girls to catch up. It’s not often that bars and clubs are putting on nights dedicated to playing a single album top to bottom multiple times (except for Taylor Swift). While there is certainly a place for the hushed sincerity from the Billie Eilishes and the Olivia Rodrigos of the world, the public wants magniloquence and excess in their lives again.

The end of the pandemic and the economic strife that has plagued America in its aftermath has found audiences yearning for the club pop sound of the late aughts and early 2010’s. People want to dance their troubles away again because we couldn’t for the first two or three years of the decade—we were forced to ponder our own solitude. I’d argue this paradigm shift was brought upon pop music by Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE (if anyone’s ever responsible for a paradigm shift, it’s Beyoncé), but the meteoric rise of Chappell Roan has cemented it. While her longevity has come into question as of late, one does not pull a festival’s largest crowd of the day at 5 PM with nothing to show for it. People are welcoming “fugly” back into the lexicon; one of the biggest songs in the world is about compulsory heterosexuality. The tide has undeniably shifted.