Charli XCX Brat Review: Existential Crisis on the Dance Floor

While the album is undeniably bratty and brash, it’s also frequently vulnerable.

Charli XCX, Brat
Photo: Harley Weir

Charli XCX should be a bigger star, and she knows it. The British singer-songwriter got her start as a Pitchfork-approved pop auteur, and 2013’s underrated True Romance remains a skipless synth-pop debut. But aside from 2014’s “Boom Clap,” she’s failed to make much of a splash as a solo artist on either side of the pond.

Conceived and recorded during lockdown, at the height of the pandemic, 2020’s insular How I’m Feeling Now allowed Charli to redefine herself, free from industry expectations. Her latest effort, Brat, splits the difference between the stay-at-home hyperpop of that album and the more radio-friendly dance-pop of 2022’s Crash, and the result is one of the most relentlessly infectious rave-ups since Katy B’s On a Mission.

Brat is, in part, inspired by Ministry of Sound-influenced club music of the mid-2000s (the so-called “club classics” to which Charli refers on the euphoric, hard-hitting track of the same name). The beats and vocals throughout are sliced and diced into unrecognizable shapes and sounds. On “Sympathy Is a Knife,” synth stabs and machine-gun handclaps are paired with stuttering beats and distorted bass to form a mass of bone-rattling bedlam.

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Like Brat’s production—furnished by frequent collaborator A.G. Cook, French knob-twirler Gessaffelstein, and George Daniel, among others—the lyrics are bold, bright, and in-your-face. Charli leans into her party-girl image on the understated bait-and-switch of an opener “360,” name-drops herself on “Club Classics,” and anoints herself a “cult classic” all her own on “Von Dutch.” And that’s just on the first third of the album.

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But while Brat is undeniably bratty and brash, it’s also frequently vulnerable. On “So I,” a tribute to late hyperpop pioneer Sophie, Charli expresses regrets over allowing her self-doubt to prevent a closer personal relationship with the artist (“You’d say, ‘Come on, stay for dinner’/I’d say, ‘No, I’m fine’/Now I really wished I’d stayed”), and her lingering desire for her friend’s approval (“When I make songs, I remember things you’d suggest…Would you like this one? Maybe just a little bit?”).

More crucially, Charli’s carefully curated braggadociousness betrays a profound insecurity and need for, alternately and perhaps paradoxically, larger fame and a simpler life. “I’m famous but not quite/But I’m perfect for the background/One foot in a normal life,” she muses, her voice pointedly disguised by Auto-Tune, on “I Might Say Something Stupid,” a brooding, minimalist ambient ballad in the key of Kid A. On “Everything Is Romantic,” Charli finds romance in the mundane—“Jesus Christ on a plastic sign,” “sandals on the stirrups of the scooters”—intoxicated by the beauty of southern Italy.

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Charli’s exploration of her priorities isn’t merely slapped atop catchy club beats though. Her ambivalence is in direct conversation with the music itself: Charli’s reckoning with her status as a cult star on “Rewind” is cleverly juxtaposed with the glitchy sounds of a tape looping, and lyrics like “Breaking myself down/Building myself up/Repeating it” are made literal on “B2B,” as the song’s earworm structure cycles back again and again to her nagging uncertainty.

On the album’s penultimate track, “I Think About It All the Time,” Charli fantasizes about stopping her birth control and admits, “I’m so scared I’m missing out on something,” in the tossed-off affectation of a faceless freestyle or Italo-disco chanteuse. “My career seems so small in the existential scheme of it all,” she quips. But, then, Charli immediately follows that up with the absolutely aggro “365”—“Meet me in the bathroom if you’re bumpin’ that/3-6-5 party girl”—and it’s perfectly clear how she’s feeling now.

Score: 
 Label: Atlantic  Release Date: June 7, 2024  Buy: Amazon

Sal Cinquemani

Sal Cinquemani is the co-founder and co-editor of Slant Magazine. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Billboard, The Village Voice, and others. He is also an award-winning screenwriter/director and festival programmer.

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