Charli XCX - BRAT

Charli XCX is at her best when she's doing whatever the fuck she wants.

Think of the undistilled master-at-work-ery that fills her beloved 2017 mixtape 'Pop 2' and five-week 2020 lockdown creation 'how i'm feeling now'. Those projects always felt simultaneously like her loosest, offering up complete artistic freedom and a borderless approach to pop music, and her tightest, cutting through any bullshit to deliver an in-your-face instant cult classic.

That energy saturates 'BRAT', her sixth studio album, released via Atlantic to the surprise of anyone who's followed her tumultuous relationship with the label. Her last full-length, 2022's 'Crash', saw Charli toy with the idea of going as mainstream as possible, blowing up the budget and that version of Charli in the process. 'BRAT', despite settling back into Charli's preferred position in the underground, isn't the complete opposite in its mission.

'BRAT' is still hedonistic, screaming for attention and knowing she'll get it. Its first few offerings - 'Von dutch', 'Club classics', '360' - are cocky and cunty, projecting themes of obsession, pride, vanity. Lyrics like "cult classic but I still pop" in lead single 'Von Dutch' allude to the ways Charli straddles the mainstream and underground pop worlds and always has done (see 2023's 'Speed Drive', made for the Barbie soundtrack with PC Music alum EasyFun and sampling Robyn's 'Cobrastyle', while still breaking the Top 10), while the pure arrogance of "I wanna dance to me" in 'Club classics' doubles down on the tone of this era. Kicking off the whole record is the line "I went my own way and I made it, I'm your favourite reference", but all of these songs serve as a facade, and the rest of 'BRAT' tells a different story.

Much of 'BRAT' sees Charli grappling with her own insecurities in all of their forms. 'Sympathy is a knife' finds her comparing herself to another woman and getting suicidal about it over jolting synths, sort of like a heavier, more arresting 'Gone'. Then comes 'I might say something stupid', a synth ballad that strips away Charli's main character persona and leaves her feeling like an extra.

These themes pop up again later, notably in 'Rewind', the most obviously A. G. Cook produced track on 'BRAT' where Charli reminisces the days before she worried about her image or success, and most memorably on 'Girl, so confusing', a gossipy, glitchy track about a rift with an unnamed fellow pop star that'll ultimately set alight a certain side of X (formerly Twitter) on release.

Positioned, perhaps purposefully jarringly, between them is 'So I', the gorgeous ode to Sophie, the late producer and hyperpop pioneer who aided Charli in swerving into a phase of her career that'd come to define her. Delicate and offbeat, marrying tiptoeing synths with darker piano stabs, Charli's voice floats over it as she riffs off Sophie single 'It's Okay To Cry'.

Rarely does 'BRAT' return to the braggadocious heights of the singles, but when it does, it's a welcome bit of fun. 'Mean girls', a tongue-in-cheek assessment of the current It Girl landscape, manages to sound like an alternative universe version of David Guetta's 'Sexy Bitch', while 'Talk talk' recalls mid-2000s disco house as Charli gets nervous about seeing a fella (presumably her now-fiancé, The 1975's George Daniel) in real life. The love songs here are the opposite of obvious too; 'Everything is romantic' rattles off mundanities, like driving in manual and early nights, in a flow somewhere between MIA and Mike Skinner, over a pulsing garage beat.

In 'BRAT''s final moments, Charli earnestly ponders motherhood on 'I think about it all the time', an affecting track that's maybe the most unexpected addition here. Those thoughts are almost immediately forgotten as '365' kicks in. A remix of '360' that spirals into the sweatiest, stickiest, MDMA-fuelled rave banger, it caps off 'BRAT' on a high but leaves behind a question of whether the party is more than just something Charli loves. Is she only living in the present when she's partying? On '365', she isn't thinking about the past ('Rewind', 'Apple') or the future ('I think about it all the time') or even her position in pop culture.

Yes, 'BRAT' is a club record, but if it was all floorfiller, it wouldn't be Charli XCX. It's for the girls who go hard on the floor with no regard for tomorrow, but it's also for the girls who have breakdowns in the toilets and spend their comedown days paranoid and scrolling other girls' Instagram photos, feeling like shit. It's the most raw and honest version of Charli she's shown us in a while, a complicated pop figure who's more than just a party girl.