This summer, when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president, the Big News Story briefly overlapped with the Big Culture Story: Brat summer. My social feed was flooded with lime green videos of Harris’s speeches remixed to different songs from the Charli XCX album. Gym-fit gay men on Fire Island were dancing in neon tank-tops emblazoned with the word “kamala”. Even the singer herself got in on the act, posting: “kamala IS brat.” It briefly felt as though we had entered another dimension.
The memes spawned bewildered commentary in the legacy media, including a hilarious segment on CNN in which the network’s 69-year-old “Gen Z correspondent” tried to explain why the crossover was “cool”. Brat summer is often assumed to be a Gen Z phenomenon. I can see why, because, on the surface, the songs are about the youthful pursuits of partying, pleasure and excess. But at risk of starting micro-generational warfare, Charli XCX herself is a 32-year-old millennial. And as someone who is turning the same age in six weeks (not that I’m counting), it’s impossible to escape the sadness lurking within her songs. It’s not just about being a “365 party girl”—it’s about feeling as though you’re at a crossroads. That early-30s sense of being on the treadmill of life and never quite knowing where you belong or what you want, as your youth slowly disappears. The melancholic, sublime remix album is emblematic of a year in which culture was dominated by the theme of reckonings happening slightly later in life. Coming-of-age stories just before middle-age.
Before Brat summer, Challengers was one of the first big cultural moments of 2024. Luca Guadagnino’s more-than-a-tennis-movie, starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist firmly captured the zeitgeist and, for weeks, it felt like it was the only thing that Very Online people could talk about. Everything from the homoerotic churro stick to the fashion and the pulsating sexual tension was hyper-analysed. The film flits between a time when the trio—coach Tashi (Zendaya) and professional players Patrick Zweig (O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Faist)—were teenagers and when they’re in their early thirties. Once a promising player herself, Tashi’s career was blighted by injury and, in the jumps forward, we see her as a coach who is obsessed with helping Art reach his potential.
In some ways, the film is a classic love triangle. Throughout, we see Patrick and Art battling it out on the tennis court, knowing Tashi is the real prize. At first, her status as an extremely coveted person seems vaguely aspirational, but we soon learn that she is worn down by the pressure of being the only one who can bring out the best in both men. That’s why the end of the film is so powerful. When Tashi unleashes her signature roar, she rediscovers the fire that we haven’t seen since she was a teenager.
In Industry—the HBO drama that follows the lives of a group of damaged, chaotic bankers at the fictional bank Pierpoint & Co—we see another love triangle. Throughout the show’s third season, Yasmin Kara Hanani (Marisa Abela) seems lost after the sudden disappearance of her father, amid a decades-long sexual abuse and embezzlement scandal. Previously, Yasmin was the classic old-money rich girl, who walked through doors that were held open for her. But her once-elite last name is now toxic. Now, tabloid photographers are following her every move, desperate to make her the “face” of her father’s scandal.
Yasmin begins a relationship with Henry Muck (Kit Harington), a slightly useless aristocrat who reminds her of her sleazy father. Henry is the polar opposite of Rob Spearing (Harry Lawtey), the man from humble beginnings whom Yasmin has loved practically since she met him. In the finale, after sleeping with Rob and telling him she loves him, Yasmin decides to marry Henry. She realises that she can’t survive in elite society—or keep her secrets hidden from the press—without the influence of Henry’s powerful family. “We need to be practical,” she tells Henry, when she suggests the idea of marriage. In other words: it’s time to grow up.
Looking back to the start of the year, the first film I watched was All of Us Strangers—Andrew Haigh’s haunting gay romance starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. In the film, Adam (Scott) navigates grief and childhood trauma. Running through the story is the feeling of loneliness—Adam’s friends are all having children and moving to the suburbs, and he doesn’t know what his life should look like. It reminded me of how, in our culture, gay stories are often about coming out, the Aids crisis or historical dramas. These are obviously important, but there are comparatively very few representations of the more mundane middle—that time where you have to figure out what sort of gay life you want to have, and what that represents.
I felt similar emotions when listening to Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat—the remix album of collaborations that Charli XCX released in October. If the original skewed more towards pleasure and excess, then the second album heightened its more vulnerable moments, such as in the “Girl, so confusing” duet with Lorde, in which the two artists reflect on how their insecurities led to a fractured relationship. On the remix album, Charli talks more about the downsides of fame, like the pressure and loneliness of being at the top. “I'm trying to shut off my brain, I'm thinking about work all the time,” she sings on “Everything is romantic”, a duet with Caroline Polachek. “I feel smothered by logistics, need my fingerprints on everything.” When she teams up with The 1975 and Jon Hopkins on a new version of “I might say something stupid,” she captures a more relatable early thirties feeling—that precise moment, right at the end of a night out, when the birds start to chirp and you realise that your days of partying might be over. “I don't know if I belong here anymore,” sings frontman Matty Healy over soft piano.
Perhaps a shift towards later-in-life coming-of-age stories reflects generational differences. When I was growing up, 30 was always the age when you were supposed to have everything together. In one of my favourite romantic-comedies, My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), best pals Jules (Julia Roberts) and Michael (Dermot Mulroney) made a pact that they would get married if they weren’t engaged to anyone else by the old age of 27. In Sex and the City and Bridget Jones, the female protagonists were treated as pariahs for being unmarried in their thirties. But now, it’s less clear what we’re supposed to have—and when.
Whether Brat is really “for” millennials or Gen Z, what both generations share is that, economically, they have far fewer opportunities than their parents, despite living in a digitally connected world where it seems as though there should be more options than ever. There is plenty of space for insecurities to fester in this squeezed, uncertain space—and loneliness, too, if it feels like everyone else knows what they’re doing.
In 2024, culture reflected that there is a point where you have to make big decisions and have a conversation with yourself about what kind of life you want. I think that’s called growing up.
