In April 2025, the pop singer Charli xcx posted a TikTok reflecting on nearly a year of her seminal album Brat: “It’s really hard to let go of Brat and let go of this thing that is so inherently me and become my entire life, you know?” she said. “I started thinking about culture, and the ebbs and flows and lifespan of things … ” She acknowledged that over-saturation is perilous, and that maybe she should stop, but “I’m also interested in the tension of staying too long. I find that quite fascinating.”
The frank, informal admission fit with Brat, a pop culture-shifting album that channeled, with stunning immediacy, the imperious ego and bristling insecurity of an artist keenly aware of her own precarious level of fame. Her ambivalence was understandable – Brat rapidly turned Charli, who spent over a decade as a fixture of pop’s so-called middle class, into a main pop girl, an artist played at midwest sorority weddings and used by a US presidential campaign. But her interest in “the tension of staying too long” also felt a little trite, the type of smart-sounding musing that dead-ends in self-awareness. Brat summer was heady, hedonistic, fun – a meme, an aesthetic, a vibe, a moment. That said moment passes? Well … yeah.
