brat review: Charli XCX delivers her best album in years

Being Charli XCX is very fashionable right now, and she knows it. Her commercial peak is most likely behind her, but the critical respect has never been higher. She’s more popular than a cult classic, but niche enough to be cool. Other people want to be her, she says, and she has a point. Camila Cabello, for one, has been accused, both by fans and by Charli herself, of copying Charli’s aesthetic and musical style with her recent single “I Luv It.” Katy Perry has traded kitschy wigs for motocross jackets as she tiptoes toward a potential comeback record. Charli has proven that a pop star’s career can peak long after mainstream popularity has crested. It’s no surprise other pop stars want in.

Charli knows this, and the new album brat, released today, is aptly named. While never exactly humble in her lyrics, this self-proclaimed troll doesn’t pull any punches here. Beyond the bizarrely discourse-generating album art, Charli uses the album as her chance to talk her shit, usually about how great she is, but occasionally about how annoying someone else is. She wryly name-drops famous friends in the single “360,” which opens with the lyric “I went my own way and I made it/I’m your favorite reference, baby.”

It’s hard to disagree. After achieving a smattering of hits on both sides of the Atlantic a decade ago—“I Love It,” “Fancy,” “Boom Clap”—the artist, born Charlotte Aitchison, zagged. She worked with left-of-field collective PC Music and found kindred spirits in producers A.G. Cook and late pioneer SOPHIE, ushering their style and techniques to at least mainstream-adjacent. Mixtapes Vroom Vroom (2016), No. 1 Angel, and masterpiece Pop 2 (both 2017) reinvented her image and helped popularize the ephemeral subgenre hyperpop. These projects pushed pop music forward while stripping it down to bare essentials: repetitive, minimal lyrics; pitch-shifted voices; termitic synths; thudding, metallic percussion. PC Music tracks and their ilk are often sparse and maximalist at once, with only 3 or 4 sonic elements engineered to fill a room, and then some.

Charli’s output since this streak has been no less acclaimed, even if it was a more mixed bag. Her 2019 self-titled album tapped into Pop 2’s collaborative energy and was intended to herald her arrival as the new queen of alt-pop. But it lacked the 2017 mixtape’s spontaneity and fun. 2022’s Crash gave tongue-in-cheek “sell-out era”—fitting as she railed against her contract with Atlantic—and while funny, it was a bit of a misstep in hindsight. (The teenage raver who went on to make “Boom Clap” decides to sell out… now?) How I’m Feeling Now, the album she wrote and recorded over six weeks during the 2020 lockdown, is an outlier of the group, letting her tap back into that freewheeling, fast-paced groove. Overthinking has long been a facet of her lyrics, but when it comes to the music, Charli is better when she’s loose.

Thankfully, brat-era Charli adopts messiness as a guiding principle. Not imperfection, as Beyoncé did with her 2013 reinvention. But messy as in picking fights with fellow pop stars on the internet and including rather unflattering lyrics that may or may not reference the biggest one in the world. On “Sympathy is a knife,” Charli sings: “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show/fingers crossed behind my back/I hope they break up quick.” Aitchison is engaged to The 1975 drummer and producer George Daniel; perhaps you recall his bandmate Matty Healy’s recent whirlwind romance and the album it maybe (probably) inspired. In “Girl, so confusing,” Charli bemoans comparisons to another woman in the industry who’s “all about writing poems” while the singer is “about throwing parties.” Sleuths and stans have deduced its subject matter to be Lorde—or is it Marina?

The gossip element is fun, of course, and Charli knows what she’s doing including it. But the meat of these songs is her own insecurity, specifically regarding being a woman in the music industry. Charli has not achieved the commercial success of Taylor Swift; few have. “I couldn’t be her if I tried,” Charli sings on “Sympathy.” Later, on “Rewind,” she asks candid questions about her body and career. “I used to never think about Billboard,” she sings, “but now I started thinking again, wondering ’bout whether I deserve commercial success.” “Deserve” is the operative word here. Wanting it bad enough is one thing; questioning whether other people see you as worthy of it is quite another. “So I,” a beautiful tribute to SOPHIE, describes how much the late producer’s work influences Charli’s own. In “I think about it all the time,” she grapples with whether she wants children, and what it might mean for her career. Lyrically, brat may be Charli’s most candid and sincere album.

But ultimately, brat is a party. Truth be told, Charli released most of the real bangers on this record as (immaculate) advanced singles, but there are still surprises. “Mean girls,” about a certain type of 20-something woman populating lower Manhattan and produced in part by Hudson Mohawke, disrupts itself halfway through with a funky, house-y piano breakdown—a rare organic, almost acoustic sound not just within brat, but Charli’s whole discography. “Everything is romantic” flirts with strings and woodwinds within its balls-to-the-wall intensity. Charli’s new romance has perhaps introduced a new sonic palette to her work, but it’s a sound you can scream at 2 a.m. in a club or your bedroom regardless.

brat is full of these moments, the kind that wield the affirmative power of the best pop music. Yes, beginning an album cycle with the lyric “It’s okay to just admit that you’re obsessed with me,” saying how everyone wants to dance to her music, and flexing her famous friends are far cries from relatability. But the point is not for her to feel like you—even when occasionally, it happens. The lyrics are simple, you learn them quickly, and you sing along in the first person. You start to feel like Charli XCX, which is to feel not just human, but like one of the most interesting ones in the room.