YOU’RE READING THIS ON THE INTERNET, so your eyes have likely tired of all that green. Charlotte Aitchison is the party responsible for all those memes and calls for #BRATSUMMER. Perhaps you know her as musician Charli XCX. This social media moment is hyping up her sixth studio album, BRAT. Offhand, it may seem a fluke, like the dumb machinations of an influencer who by happenstance hit the mark. But actually, this moment of numbing chartreuse is the savvy victory lap of a multiplatinum-selling songwriter who spent fifteen years crafting a style, mostly at the service of larger pop musicians. She’s scaled the US charts a dozen times, but seldom under her own name. Her highest peaks belong to others (Camila Cabello, Selena Gomez, James Blunt, BTS) or offer her up as a feature (supporting Iggy Azalea or Icona Pop). Her fanbase figured she’d stay slept on, a Cathy Dennis of our age. Until #BRATSUMMER.
As a musician, Charli XCX was born online. Her first album circulated via CD-Rs and MySpace when the artist was just fourteen. Journalists love to drop this detail, but seldom do they follow up on how this ever-shifting www. vernacular inflects her songwriting style. Her compositions often hinge on the repetition of single words or phrases, like “focus,” “airport,” or “number one.” Syncopation spins the familiar into an earworm, disarticulating the very meaning of a lyric into a melodic vibe. After a couple of major-label albums failed to connect, Charli saw promise in how this approach might marry with the emergent underground PC Music movement. Spearheaded by the late SOPHIE and A. G. Cook, these sound sculptors used vocal modulation to transform any bedroom singer into a K-pop star—displaced within a synthetic landscape that was critically unreal, pixelated and vast. The Vroom Vroom EP (2016) was Charli’s first stab at this sound and the recipient of great vitriol from her label and critics alike. Eight years on, that sound has become the genre of music called Hyperpop.
The strength of her new record is how it pushes real life through this sound. It leans into the din to arrive at honesty. Let’s start with that cover: a stark piece of graphic design created by New York firm SPECIAL OFFER Inc. There’s no sultry photo of an artist pouting. No attribution, even. Just the four low-res letters of the title. As a graphic, it’s totally bratty. It grabs your attention and doesn’t care what you want. But it wouldn’t have the legs of its present internet immersion if it weren’t counterpoint to a recording so confident, meticulous, and crystalline in its world-building. With BRAT, Charli delivers on the hype that has, until this pop culture moment, plagued her with a perennial underdog status. But this has consequently afforded her confidence to try new things. The lyrical quality of BRAT operates like the album cover, dashing the posture of well-oiled pop lyricism, proffering all the poetry of a Notes app jotting. “And I’m so scared I’m missin’ out on something / So we had a conversation on the way home / Should I stop my birth control?” Set in a sonic realm that is engulfing and techgnostic, these seemingly casual observations become all the more humane and vulnerable. A glimpse of the fleshy humanism attempting to conceal itself in TikTok’s endless techno-dystopian churn.
The lead single, “Von Dutch,” offered us a first taste of BRAT. And it’s a hard-hitting piece of confrontation. In the video, directed by Torso, whose propulsive catwalk camerawork produced the first viral Thierry Mugler campaign since the designer’s passing, Charli is a pop star at Charles de Gaulle who just won’t be left alone. The camera-eye follows incessantly, assaulting her all the way onto an airplane. So she hits back. There’s torn couture. There’s spit and blood. It all folds into the relentless melodic churn and the Ed Banger–style beats by producer Easyfun (“I’m your number one / I’m your number one / I’m your number one”).
Orchestrated to contrast, “Girl, so confusing” is a confessional that questions whether two female pop singers can cultivate genuine friendship in the snake pit of the music industry. Offering up that insecurity to the same publicity machine visualized in “Von Dutch,” team XCX staged an event and gossip columns took the bait, wagering if the track was about Lorde (“they say we’ve got the same hair”). When the clamor peaked, a remix appeared with a verse from Lorde that felt so genuine and introspective that “let’s work it out on the remix” was added to the green meme wave. In a culture fueled by beef, online commentators rejoiced in compassion; as YouTuber @rickochetz writes, “This is like, the polar opposite of a diss track.”
Of course, social media—being the tapestry from which it all emerged—has embraced BRAT. But Charli’s gaze into the void is not wholly uncritical. The BRAT marketing campaign has been poignantly foregrounded by its IRL properties. Announcements and significant dates arrived courtesy of “The Brat Wall,” a bit of ad space in Brooklyn, which was livestreamed whenever painters arrived to update its message. And slowly the wall would be filled in while fans across the globe peered through their phones with bated breath. The vinyl format of the album forced consternated collectors to tear through a label that lines its packaging to play the disc. Her breakout song, “360,” is everywhere on TikTok, but it literally outlines the unnaturalness of that space as it spins: “Drop down / Put the camera flash on / Work angles.” On the next track, she boasts, “I wanna dance to me / When I go to the club.” In someone else’s mouth, this would sound so noxious. But with her tongue in her cheek and her sunnies on at night, Charli knows the nuance of boast; she’s put in the work.
Happy Brat Summer. She earned it.
