One of the great things about being a musician in the internet age is that you don’t need to have a record deal to release your music - you can simply upload it and try and get people to listen to it.
The internet never forgets, though, so if you eventually go on to become a famous pop star who, say, creates the defining cultural moment of summer 2024, you’re going to have to live with the fact that your ‘early stuff’ is still going to be out there.
Yes, it turns out that - perhaps unsurprisingly - Charli XCX is no great fan of 14, the mixtape that she self-released when she was, you guessed it, just 14.
“God, I hate that album so much,” Charli says in a new interview with Variety. “I haven’t listened to it for a decade, at least. It was sort of transitional - there are guitar songs on that record, but also elements of me exploring dance music. Some of those songs are terrible, but I think there was a style there, a direction, that a few people caught on to.”
She’s being too hard on herself: 14 may sound a bit primitive, but as a statement of intent that sets a blueprint for a future career, it holds up pretty well. Anyone who’s been making music for a while will have tracks in their archives that they cringe at when they listen to them, but it’s all part of the process that every artist has to go through.
Take Finneas, for example: “When I was 13 or 14 I got Logic Pro on my computer,” he told Consequence Of Sound in 2021. “The price had gone down, which was why I could afford it… and I started to love music production.”
Initially, though, music production didn’t love him back. “I recorded terrible little demos and stuff, and I didn’t really make anything that I thought sounded good at all for probably five years,” he admits. “It was about five years of making stuff all the time, and thinking it was all really bad.”
All of those demos, though, eventually led to Ocean Eyes, a track that was sung by his sister, Billie Eilish, who was just 13 at the time. “I remember being like ‘this is good’. That was the first thing after many years of really bad stuff,” says Finneas, and sure enough, it was the song that brought Eilish to the wider world’s attention.
Eilish, of course, collaborated with Charli XCX on the remix of Guess, which appeared on the latter’s Brat and It's Completely Different but Also Still Brat album this year.
Elsewhere in the Variety interview, Charli reveals that, despite its chaotic, thrown together aesthetic, the ‘brat’ concept was in her head before she even started working on her smash hit album.
“Usually when I’ve made a record, there is this transitional phase where I’m thinking about how to present the music,” she says. “But with this one, I actually did that first - I was thinking about marketing before I was making the music. I had the title first, which was such a brief and a super-useful writing tool. It put boundaries on the songwriting, because immediately if I was writing a song with AG Cook or Cirkut, it would just immediately be like, ‘That’s not brat,’ and we would move on and do something that was brat.”
