Brat Album Review and Charli’s Shift in Pop Iconography

by Sawyer Huckabee

Within the first two minutes of Charli pop bass to house music with ease. Producers A.G. Cook and EASYFUN also add a definite ‘hyperpop’ influence to the album, although Charli does not completely lean into the glitchy, sometimes unwelcoming element of the genre on BRAT . On the contrary, Charli and crew have constructed BRAT as a welcoming album. In the initial announcements, Charli implied the album was constructed as a “club” record. Such a genre choice allows people to dance without necessarily being invested in the lyrical content. That is true for BRAT —the songs are agreeable and danceable on the surface, even without sacrificing lyrical depth.

XCX's sixth studio album BRAT comes a blunt but iconic line—“I don’t f*****g care what you think.” At her Brooklyn Paramount concert on June 11th, thousands of people in the audience shouted this line back at her. The irreverence of this concert, which was Charli’s first live performance of the entire album, reiterated a central question: can the public accept a “brat” instead of a “pop darling”? Based on the past few weeks of public and critical reception, the answer seems to be yes. BRAT has been celebrated by critics, receiving a score of 8.6/10 from Pitchfork and a “metascore” of 95/100 on Metacritic, which compiles critical reception from various sources. Charli’s fanbase, fiending for new music since 2022’s more pop-friendly CRASH, has been just as receptive.

Despite a clear dance-pop sound, BRAT also brings back the experimentation of the Cambridge singer’s 2017 mixtapes, her daring self-titled album Charli, and her COVID-era LP How I’m Feeling Now. BRAT is a cluster of interconnected genres, moving from synthy

The album first calls for this experience on the opener “360.” This may be the most tame song on the album sonically, where Charli releases her bratty inhibitions and lyrically praises herself on a relatively minimalist electropop beat. The second song, “Club Classics,” celebrates a canon of experimental pop, in which Charli proclaims she wants to dance to herself, A.G. Cook, and the late producer SOPHIE when she goes to the club. “Sympathy is a Knife” is an immediate and aggressively clashy introduction—the first two tracks already released as singles—that forces the listener to lean into the power of the bassline and just dance. “I might say something stupid,” however, is a sonic curveball—a much sadder song that leans into a different timbre, away from dance-pop and more into a computerized singer-songwriter ballad. The listener may question the placement of this song, but it’s quickly left in the dust as the record moves to “Talk talk,” a brilliantly catchy house song—maybe even ‘dumb’ in its constant repetition of “talk talk” throughout the chorus. On the recent Critics Corner, a News & Arts program at WKCR, we discussed a contradiction between the ingenuity of her dance songs in its exaggeration of pop motifs. It was only when we considered the rest of the album and the juxtaposition between dance and sad songs that Charli employs that we found our answer.

The album often switches between a series of do-nothing-but-dance tracks and a few songs—including “So I” and “I think about it all the time”—that might be considered impossible to dance to due to their depressing contents. The songs describe, respectively, her regret after her friend SOPHIE's death and her contemplation of having children. However, once you listen to the album a few times, you’ll realize that beneath the light surface, the timbre of the album rarely deviates from a depressing note. You might be dancing to Charli's suicidal thoughts on “Sympathy is a knife,” wishing she had never chosen the life of fame on “Rewind,” or how she believes her genetic line is doomed on “Apple”. Suddenly, the bratty, self-aggrandizing experience of “360” and “Von dutch” and the party-at-allcosts hedonism of “365” and “b2b” make much more sense. Charli details her life in some of her most vulnerable lyrics, glossed over by the glimmering sheer of dance-pop. The life experienced on the surface of BRAT is impossibly unreal, a self-sabotaging, dissing, selfish, and overindulgent party. “Girl, so confusing” details Charli’s relationship with Lorde, where she admits “Sometimes I think you might hate me/Sometimes I think I might hate you.” Lorde responds on a remix with her own troubles with friendship, but shows how much she cares about Charli. This digs under the surface of BRAT to reveal a cathartic externalization of Charli’s troubles and an attempt to fix them.

Much like its minimalist green cover, BRAT forces misunderstanding. At the cover’s announcement, Charli was criticized on social media for both the putrid green choice of color and the boring display—only a typographically simple version of the album name. Once the album came out, the cover came around again, only to be nearly universally praised. Listening to BRAT necessitates a similar experience. Despite the experience of seemingly mindless pop, Charli has constructed an album brilliant for subverting and forcing this mindlessness upon her audience. Her Brooklyn Paramount concert proved that point: the venue quickly became a sea of brilliantly designed hedonism, a carnival of endless proportions, even as Charli spilled her guts on stage. Her performance was enrapturing, causing the room to overflow with incomparable energy. She paused at some points, even tearing up while singing the sadder portions of the album, until going straight back to dancing. When “365” comes around, reappropriating the sonic motifs of “360,” Charli cannot care what her audience thinks. In the pursuit to party despite all conditions, despite even a depressing soundtrack, we may be just as mindless as her.