Charli XCX’s last album was designed to reach as many people as possible. Satisfying the contract she signed with Atlantic as a teenager, 2022’s Crash was a conceptual go-for-broke by a pop star who had made her name as a refusenik, save a few uneasy youthful flirtations with the mainstream. She swapped her avant garde collaborators for blue-chip songwriters, mastered slick choreo and duly interpolated old dance bangers. It worked, becoming her most successful album yet. Having simply decided to be successful and then pulled it off, most artists in her position would surely keep at it. Not Charli, who has since admitted that she couldn’t even listen to some of Crash, nor stomach the rictus-grin promo. The sleazy grind of Brat, her superb sixth album, is the palate cleanser, albeit one that tastes like cigarettes, vodka and chemical afterburn.
Indicative of her unique cult status, Charli has returned to Atlantic and also to the intimacy she shares with a devoted fanbase steeped in her 16-year evolution from DIY teenage raver to “your favourite reference, baby”, as she flexes on confidently minimalist opener 360. You’re DOA in pop right now without a wealth of lore – just ask poor Dua Lipa, whose sheeny surfaces no longer cut it. But Charli’s remains niche, the subject of Discord and Reddit communities rather than tabloid gossip (excepting perhaps her engagement to 1975 drummer George Daniel). For all Brat’s anxious lyrics about her celebrity status – including the ones in which she admits calling the paps on herself, because “everyone else does it constantly” – it makes no apologies for its insider energy.
