“I’m famous but not quite.” Of all the lyrics from Charli XCX’s 2024 album Brat, this is the one that has turned out to be the least true. Previously a “cult classic”, well known enough to be referenced in EastEnders but never quite industry enough to win a Brit Award, beloved by the gay community but not so much the PureGym stereo, Charli XCX no longer has, as she puts it in the next line of her song “I Might Say Something Stupid”, “one foot in a normal life”. By writing an album about her struggles on the pop scene—as well as her contradictions, her insecurities and her identity as a “365 partygirl”—she has, this year, become a bona fide superstar.
This—and Brat’s influence on pop culture—we know to be true. Copious column inches and even more cloud megabytes have already been used up analysing the phenomenon: its call to hedonism; its ambivalence about motherhood; its feminist credentials; its colour scheme; the baggie poster; Brat lore, such as the fact that said poster flouted advertising guidelines and was obstinately reworked by XCX and her team to become a sandwich bag, or Charli’s early iMessage conversation, duly screenshotted and posted to Instagram, about the ugly, pixellated font. But while Brat was helped along by the algorithm and meme culture, that’s not the whole story. Why was it Brat that finally shot Charli XCX to the mainstream? And why did it happen now?
On first listen, Brat is anything but mainstream. Unlike XCX’s last album, Crash, the last she had to write to fulfil a multi-record deal and which sounds like she’s put herself through a filter in comparison, Brat returns to the clubby, hyperpop sound of her 2016 EP Vroom Vroom (produced in part by the hyperpop pioneer Sophie, who died in 2021 and to whom Charli dedicates a song, “So I”, on Brat). With its brash synths, heavy autotune and just-about-identifiable references to the online zeitgeist—within 14 seconds of its now iconic opening track, “360”, Charli has sung the lyric “call me Gabriette”, an Instagram it-girl now dating the 1975 frontman Matty Healy—listening to it feels like you’re careering into the future at 100mph. To be fair, this feeling has been there for the entirety of Charli’s career (“those slugs, no they can’t catch me,” she sang on the song “Vroom Vroom”), but, in 2024, the world caught up. An artist who has always been ahead of her time suddenly became very much of it.
The internet references have certainly helped. There is a sense that Brat exists across two dimensions—social media and real life—and somehow brings them together, with pithy, tongue-in-cheek lyrics like “I’m so Julia” (Fox, the actress and it-girl known for Uncut Gems) being as satisfying to sing along to as they are useful for writing captions. Charli’s self-mythology similarly adds to the semi-jokey big-headedness and hyper-self-awareness that characterises an online generation: “I’m your favourite reference, baby,” she brags on “360”, and then, on “Club Classics”, “I wanna dance to ME”. And then there is a sprinkle of good old-fashioned celebrity gossip: on “Sympathy is a Knife”, Brat’s first foray into vulnerability, Charli laments her feelings of envy and comparison to another woman (“Couldn’t even be her if I tried,” she sings, “I’m opposite, I’m on the other side”). Fans immediately clocked that she was possibly, probably talking about Taylor Swift—cue feverish speculation. Then there was “Girl, So Confusing”, another track about professional and personal rivalry (“sometimes I think you might hate me, sometimes I think I might hate you… We talk about making music, but I don’t know if it’s honest”). Discerning listeners detected that this song was about Lorde (“people say we’re alike, they say we’ve got the same hair”); sure enough, a few weeks later, Lorde turned up to “work it out on the remix”, and, fulfilling listeners’ self-narrativising urges, the song’s initial prophecy came true: the internet really did “go crazy”.
Yet Brat’s firm rooting in the present goes beyond its courting the weaknesses of, for the want of a better phrase, the girls and the gays. All of this specificity, alongside the album’s open references to taking drugs and the personal conflict that comes with individualistic culture (“My career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all,” she sings on “I Think About It All the Time”, where she weighs up having a baby), has made it feel very different from other recent pop albums—and, counterintuitively, given the actual substance of its music, more universal. Where huge artists such as Swift might speak directly to fandoms who have long followed her personal narrative and are waiting for the next instalment, Brat unapologetically planted itself in a culture that already existed and held up a mirror to it in a big green frame.
Of course, part of its meta genius is in understanding—just like it did on the “Girl, So Confusing” remix—that we, as a culture, like nothing more than seeing ourselves reflected in the mirror, not just because we’re vain, which we are, but because it makes us feel understood. “When you’re in the mirror, do you like what you see?” Charli asks on “360”, implying that what we see in the mirror is her, such is the scale of her influence; in fact, of course, Brat goes on to show it’s the other way round. As much as Brat allows us to watch Charli being messy and hedonistic, it also reflects in her a relatable insecurity and self-destruction, as well as a millennial generation stuck in adolescence, who are still, like Charli, “b-b-b-bumpin’ that beat” at age 32, looking back on the embers of their youth but with no promise that the future will hold anything more than 365 partying. “I think about it all the time / That I might run out of time,” she sings, about whether or not to pack it all in to get pregnant—again, reflecting the thoughts of millions of women her age who are agonising over the personal, financial and existential implications of the decision, like no generation has before.
That said, those hedonistic impulses aren’t only because of avocado-toast-related financial problems or climate change-induced terror about bringing life into the world. Brat also speaks to a post-Covid world and a post-Covid feeling. Since 2021 there has been a steady resurgence of the club scene, and electronic music has become increasingly dominant in the charts. Fred Again, a fellow Brit who had produced other artists’ music for years, broke through in 2021 with Actual Life, a euphoric dance album created during lockdown that wasn’t—couldn’t have been—actually for or about the rave, but the fantasy of it. Though Brat has proved itself to be very much for the rave, it still contains more than a trace of fantasy. The juxtaposition of the two sides of Charli—the vulnerable “girl from Essex” who worries she doesn’t fit in at an LA party and the hot “cult classic” pushing her hair back after she does a line of cocaine—makes sure of that. Since most of us will identify more readily with the first version, the second becomes as much of a fantasy identity for us as it is a mask for her.
All of which is to say: I believe it. We believe it. It doesn’t matter that “Von Dutch” initially feels like your eardrums are being sandpapered, or whether you had previously never heard of “HudMo” or “George” (Charli’s fiancé, with whom I’m sure you’re now familiar—come on, he did the “Apple” dance the other week). It has distilled our fragile, feverish present culture, with all its complexities and contradictions, into a feat of bright-green precision—one that enables us to see ourselves and escape them at the same time, which enables us to worship at XCX’s feet while feeling that she understands us deeply. For Thoroughly Postmodern Charli, it’s been a long time coming. But it could only ever have been 2024. And it could only ever have been Brat.
