They say that the dead never really leave us, as long as they live on in our hearts. And so it is for Brat summer. She was the bra strap we refused to obscure, and the bra we didn’t wear at all. She was the cigarette butt that burnt a hole in our sheets. She was the fifth bottle of wine at a dinner for two. And now – she’s gone. She was killed, as many good things are, by a bank. I’ll explain.
If you have existed online or in proximity to a queer person over the past four and a half months, chances are your timeline and life have been drenched in neon green (Pantone 3507 C, to be precise). This is the doing of the British pop singer Charli XCX, whose sixth studio album, Brat, dropped in June 2024. XCX has been on the brink of superstardom for almost a decade. Her low-fi aesthetic and shameless party girl energy have seen us through two of the longest things that have ever happened on this Earth: a John Green film adaptation and the pandemic. Prior to Brat, XCX collaborated with the likes of Troye Sivan, Christine and the Queens, and Icona Pop. But with this latest album, XCX has crossed the fame Rubicon.
The timeline is thus. In May 2024, XCX performed a set at Brooklyn’s Lot Radio in front of a Brat-green wall. A few weeks later, the wall was emblazoned with the words “i’m your fav reference” in Brat’s signature lower case sans serif. Word spread. The Brat spirit was catching. Every time a new message was painted on the wall, the spirit grew stronger. By the time Brat was officially launched, its iconography was already viral. To XCX fans, the imprimatur was clear: a Brat summer must be had.
It’s difficult to explain what it is to be Brat, but I’ll try. Shakespeare once wrote, “To Brat is human, to forgive, is Brat.” Does that help? I’ll try again. Charles Dickens penned, “It was the Brat of times, it was the Brat of times.” No?
To have a Brat summer is to embody the atmosphere of the album: wild nights, zero belief in ramifications, feral vulnerability, cocaine, existential despair, bacchanalianism, ambivalence about motherhood, jealousy, bisexual chaos. After years of saccharine and polite pop stardom – of Swiftian cottagecore and Grandian high ponies – Brat summer embraces the messy. Of pilates and clean eating and sober living, Brat summer says: not a vibe for me but thank you. For many of us whose natural inclination is to not remove mascara after a night out, Brat has felt like relief, like freedom. It’s simply fun, too. See that green plant? That’s Brat. Green Dot by Madeleine Gray? Brat again. My editor letting me keep that last line? Brat.
But in late capitalism, with popularity comes the inevitable: normie and brand co-option. As more and more people with less and less genuine Brat energy have gotten on the Brat train, the message has of course been diluted. Sorry, straight guys, but your Monster energy drink does not a Brat make. Many have argued that the day Kamala Harris’s campaign appropriated Brat iconography on their social media channels was the day Brat summer died. I disagree – I think a mixed-race female US presidential nominee who calls Trump “weird” is pretty Brat. Instead, I mark Brat summer’s time of death as 9 August 2024. This is the day Deutsche Bank, a German investment company, advertised on Instagram that it was “looking for a Brat in finance”. If there is anything that is not Brat, it’s the bank-industrial complex.
Brat summer may be over, but her spirit lives on. Keep walking like a bitch, keep bumpin’ that. As Emily Dickinson said: “Brat is the thing with feathers.”
• Madeleine Gray is a writer and critic from Sydney. Her debut novel is Green Dot
