A brat, said Charli xcx – describing not so much her album, Brat, as the spirit of brat – has a “pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”. This is “brat summer” – not to be confused with rat girl summer (2023, a TikTok trend centred on living like a rat), which itself was a verbal variation on hot girl summer (which was, according to the journalist Jasmine Fox-Suliaman in 2021, “about embodying self-love, a positive body image, healthy boundaries and relationships, self-actualisation and, of course, sultry style choices”). Brat, neither a social media nor a consumer creation, is different; perhaps because it actually means something. But what?
A brat is a girl, but it’s a self-defining category – it is what you make it – so it doesn’t have to be. It’s also an album, of course, and a phenomenally successful one, hitting No 2 in the UK album chart and No 3 in the US’s Billboard chart. “The album is really confessional but also really brash – it feels like voice notes to your friends,” says Sheena Patel, a novelist and part of the 4 Brown Girls Who Write collective. “Charli xcx feels like a Dionysian agent for being more unhinged.”
