The Pop Prophecy of Charli XCX’s Sucker

Charli XCX has had quite the year—or decade, rather. Over the past 10 years, the British pop artist has seesawed between the margins and the mainstream, going from a London rave kid once mistaken for Lorde to an accidental slogan-maker for Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign. Those such as myself who’ve followed Charli her whole career, however, know that her versatility in appealing to both alternative and conventional pop sensibilities has been her strongest, most enduring trait as an artist.

Since her electric debut True Romance back in 2013, Charli has maintained a spirited if niche fanbase on top of penning multiple hit songs for other pop musicians like Selena Gomez and Icona Pop and opening for major acts like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift. Her unmatched ability to be experimental (2015’s Vroom Vroom EP, 2017’s Number 1 Angel and Pop 2, 2020’s how i’m feeling now), commercial (2022’s CRASH) or a combination of both (2019’s Charli) made her both inspirational and difficult to pin down. Her sixth, Grammy-nominated studio record, the exceptional BRAT, marked her biggest breakthrough moment, not only because it’s an exacting, alchemic blend of her avant-garde tendencies or because it breathed new life into the deadened post-COVID pop landscape, but because it makes the greatest case for Charli sticking to her guns instead of conforming to industry expectations and dominating pop music trends.

Charli XCX’s gumption and fearless determination have always made her a couple of steps ahead of the game, much of which can be tied back to one of her most underrated and under-discussed efforts, her 2014 sophomore album Sucker. Charli herself would likely disagree with this sentiment, having once dismissed Sucker as “feeling fake,” but the success of her assist on the best-selling Iggy Azalea single “Fancy” and her Fault in Our Stars contribution “Boom Clap” proved she was capable of bending the mainstream pop world to her will rather than succumbing to it. Sucker is arguably one of the purest examples of her Trojan Horsing her simple yet disarmingly blunt songwriting into irresistible earworms, with BRAT being the ultimate payoff of that approach.

Arriving at the tail end of 2014, Sucker was a sleek, more accessible follow-up to the cool disaffection of True Romance, incorporating crunchy rock ‘n’ roll guitars and punk-inflected beats as sweet and sticky as the heart-shaped lollipop that Charli holds on the album’s cover. The album’s mix of sonic brashness with a bubblegum-cheerleader aesthetic extended to Charli’s changing persona as well. She made slight sartorial upgrades to her True Romance look, keeping her choker but straightening and side-sweeping her massive mane of hair and putting on bold, cherry-red lipstick. Another artist probably would’ve been deemed a sellout for such a pivot, but this shift in Charli’s image felt naturally integrated into her artistic evolution, an embodiment of the bright sheen of commercial pop that also sneakily pushed it to its darkest possible edges.

Charli XCX’s enlistment of both indie and radio-friendly collaborators—Ariel Rechtshaid, Rostam Batmanglij, Cashmere Cat, Benny Blanco, Stargate—also helped give Sucker its eclectic, subversive feel to make it stand out among other big pop records from that time. In contrast to the compact hooks of Swift’s 1989, the gothy anthems of Lorde’s Pure Heroine, and the R&B/EDM stylings of Ariana Grande’s My Everything, Sucker brimmed with a gleefully volatile, demonic energy, detonated by Charli’s myriad of influences (The Hives, Weezer, Bow Wow Wow) and clear enjoyment in fucking around with formula.

Of course, Charli’s IDGAF attitude didn’t just come out of nowhere. According to a Pitchfork interview in 2014, part of the album’s impetus was Charli’s cynicism and anger towards music industry figures who initially doubted her after True Romance failed to chart (despite its critical acclaim) but grew to embrace her following “Fancy” and “Boom Clap”’s Billboard success. You can feel that deeply rooted angst right out of the gate on the opening title track, where Charli roars on a scream-along, thickly accented chorus (“FAWK YOO… SUCKAH!”) and snarls at overeager men trying to win back her attention. “Break the Rules” and the Ramones homage “London Queen” continue the parade of rebellion; the former casts Charli as a party girl messiah coming to emancipate teens from their suburban boredom, while the latter uses cheeky, clever wordplay and (literally) politically incorrect references to show what dangerous fun could be had in riding with her to club.

This tension between Charli XCX’s loud, proud defiance against traditional pop music standards and genuine earnestness in trying to transmogrify it animates the rest of Sucker to an almost dizzying degree. In one moment, she’s chanting about the blissful thrill of adolescent romance on “Boom Clap,” whose fluttery, starry-eyed instrumental still makes me astral project every time I hear it. In the next, she and fellow UK pop peer Rita Ora maximize their joint girl-power slay on “Doing It,” whose slinky, shimmering bounce can make anyone listening to it feel invincible. Her lyrical takedowns could either be hilariously brutal (“Breaking Up”) or lightly satirical (“Gold Coins,” “Famous”), yet somehow, these contradictory tones never feel incongruous. Instead, they act as a fascinating dialogue between the reckless and cunning sides of Charli’s creative identity.

Sucker does sometimes suffer from an occasional dated song or two, but even its clunkers have a charming nostalgic quality to them. Revisiting them is like laughing while reading a really dramatic journal entry from high school. The Rivers Cuomo-produced “Hanging Around” definitely sounds like something the Weezer frontman had his hands on, with its mid-Aughts stadium rock vibe recalling “Beverly Hills” (which is, interestingly and perhaps unsurprisingly, Charli’s favorite Weezer song). “Die Tonight” is a lesser thematic rehash of “Break the Rules,” though the cheugy part of me can’t help but hum along to its hook. And the middling bonus track “Red Balloon” makes one yearn for the peppy, far superior one-off “SuperLove” that preceded Sucker’s release by a year.

Luckily, Sucker ends on a high note with the jaunty, Rostam-produced closer “Need Ur Luv,” an tongue-in-cheek ode to girl group doo-wop that finds Charli contemplating leaving an abusive boyfriend. Her back-and-forth on her decision (“I need your love / I don’t want it / I need it even if it hurts me”) could be also read as her wrestling with her own frustrations around her place in the music industry, how her yearning to commit to her own convictions is constantly at odds with the pressures she’s beholden to. It may not have been intentional, but given Charli’s history of slyly calling out her label, the interpretation isn’t completely out of the question.

Perhaps Charli XCX’s dismissal of Sucker could also inform why she took such a sharp turn the year after its release when she joined the PC Music collective and began working with A.G. Cook and the late SOPHIE on hyperpop-leaning music, an almost sonic antithesis to Sucker. Even so, every era of Charli’s career has its own unique impact on the culture, and Sucker’s was no exception. Carly Rae Jepsen, another pop artist who’s permeated both the indie and mainstream pop spheres, worked with some of Charli’s Sucker collaborators on her similarly criminally underrated Emotion. Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour could be seen as a more refined repurposing of Sucker’s pop-punk template made for a Gen-Z audience, something Charli herself has acknowledged and affirmed.

But the most notable part of Sucker’s legacy is obviously “Boom Clap,” which Charli references twice on BRAT: once on the deluxe-edition track “Spring breakers,” where she likens the song to an explosion on the Grammys red carpet, and again in the “B2b” remix with Tinashe, where she appreciatively reflects on the song helping her propel her to where she is now. Such a complex, self-reflexive affection is an all-too-perfect encapsulation of Charli XCX’s ethos, where everything is delivered with both a wink and an asterisk, and despite the many hoops it’s taken to get to this point, it’s clearly worked in her favor in the long run. Guess that makes us all suckers.

Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress and Metacritic. You can find them on Twitter @samiamrosenberg.