Charli XCX and the Electric Party Girl Humanity of “BRAT”
“BRAT” is a scorching totem to the party girl ethos of Charli XCX, who — for perhaps the first time — brings her whole self to the party
The last track on BRAT, Charli XCX’s cataclysmic new record, is “365.” The song is a redux of the opening track, the hit, the internet-explosive fourth single “360.” The O.G. came out a month ago, a summer pop defibrillator, its video a travelator of stars (Chloe Sevigny, Rachel Sennott, Julia Fox) — and the sequel is somehow…better. Snarlier, Charli-er, like they piped the original through the exhaust pipe of a Yamaha: it’s BRAT’s epitome, the epicenter, the eye of the storm. “360” is the spin and the twist, the jump off the diving board at the pool; “365” is the mantra, the grind, the core of what this is all about. And this is all about Charli XCX’s blossoming into full-flung pop stardom.
Baseball teams honor beloved ballplayers with bobbleheads, hoops teams hang banners, and Hollywood has hands embalmed in concrete. Here, on “365” and throughout this sassy, jagged record, the pop star Charli XCX creates an idol of herself. Not herself as in Charlotte Aitchison, the human singer, who is patiently revealed and radically humanized throughout the album. But herself as in the Charli XCX character, exalted forever in “365,” a spitting intergalactic motorcycle ride through the XCX oeuvre (like the Eras Tour, but with more coke!). It’s Charli, baby.
“365” is a time capsule, a collection of herself and of her angels (who have, if my timeline is to be believed, painted the better part of the northern hemisphere — and, apparently, at least one penis — BRAT green) and of the world(s) she’s created, a time capsule assembled, buried, and exhumed all at once. It’s a wicked, dirty, snarling whiplash of iconic Charli moments, zipping past “Hot Girl (Bodies Bodies Bodies)” when she snaps “Who the fuck are you?” and “Unlock It (Lock It)” when the “oy!” sample chimes in throughout. It’s the place where she can be her brattiest, a fourth-wall breaking she’s-just-like-us moment when she name drops the album title (“I’m a brat when I’m bumping that”), a stirring three and a half minutes of one-upmanship of the very single she just released.
With “365” as its blazing totem, BRAT in its entirety is like some grand shook-up Diet Coke and Mentos experiment: classic Charli club tracks (we’ll call ’em “Club classics”) alongside nakedly pretty ones. The ones meant to shatter and shake do just that: “Von dutch,” “B2b,” and “Mean Girls” (not the jazzy piano break!!) are forever inner-circle Charli hits. While these little fragile holy things — “I might say something stupid,” “Girl, so confusing,” and “I think about it all the time” — peek at the artist’s vulnerability and wry humor (ever present in the Charli character, but never as animated in her music than here) more than ever before. “So I,” the elegy for her beloved collaborator Sophie, sounds like a planetarium of grief, the reflection allowing the most gorgeous melody of the album (“When I’m on stage sometimes I lie”) to shine.
The songs that do it all — the ones sizzling with lightning and rumbling with an anxious ache — feel like they might make this decade-plus-long Charli XCX experiment explode far beyond a Diet Coke and Mentos rocket. Some of her previous bangers have remained coolly detached from specificity (“Good Ones” and “Baby”), and thus lacked a final turbo-boost of humanity; and some of the ballads in her catalog seem to have dropped the XCX veneer (“Every Rule” and “Official”), almost taking the listener out of the glitter-green Charli spell. On BRAT, she finds unholy salvation in a club bathroom, and births the most integrated collection of 100%-concentrated Charli pop songs and power ballads she’s ever written. “Sympathy is a knife,” “Everything is romantic,” and “Rewind,” in particular, emanate a stuttering, sweaty, personal heat that hasn’t existed on a Charli XCX album before.
I think now, bizarrely, of a story in the Old Testament of the Bible. There’s a prophet named Elijah who hosts a contest to see whose god can light a fire on an altar. It’s between Elijah (God) and Baal’s followers (Baal). Baal’s acolytes plead with their god to set fire to their altar to no avail — Elijah mocks, “Maybe your god is asleep!” Elijah hurls water on his altar, dousing everything, and the Old Testament God rains down holy fire anyway.
On BRAT, culminating in “365,” Charli too builds an altar. Throws all of it, everything, on the pyre. Insecurity, existential dread, wandering around European cities longing for purpose. Cries to God or Baal or someone to stop the voice in her head get piled alongside the reminder: “I don’t fucking care what you think.” Heaps of nervous messy un-belonging. Wine doused and splattered over it all. Charli approaches the offering stacked high, hesitant, petrified of something true —love, Sophie, purpose — snagging her tights, but nearing anyway. She climbs on. If there was a god they’d provide a sacrifice. She sucks a skinny cigarette, and hurls it on the altar. She alights. Rev your engines. Burn it all. 365 party girl. Dance.