Charli XCX Has Never Made A Club Record

And let's hope she never does.

First of all, give me a second to rant. Besides, is there a more appropriate place to rant about your industry than a review of a Charli XCX record? 

Because I am New York City’s resident scholar of all things XCX, I pitched a review of Brat (her 6th album, out this week, for those who haven’t had to hear me talk about it in the last six months) to The Daily Beast. Pitch below.

Nice, right? Pitch accepted, good to go, etc. Six weeks later, freakin’ Rolling Stone publishes their cover story on none other than Ms. Aitchison. Read the following paragraph: 

Familiar?

Look, I’m not implying that this idea was actually stolen. I’m not the only queer man to ponder the cultural criticism embedded in Charli XCX’s music. I’ve been to Bushwick. I know I’m not alone. Rolling Stone simply beat me to it. Nonetheless, I had a lot to say on this, and I’m frustrated to have that taken away. It’s all very Charli-versus-Camila-copy-cat-coded. Clearly, I’ve moved on. Anyway: 

Any time you listen to a new album for the first time–especially by an artist you’re emotionally invested in–that initial listen is about setting expectations. The singles you played on repeat, the cover art, the tracklist and the marketing all coalesce into an idea for what you think an album will be. And that idea is rarely, if ever, true. So you take the first listen to get clarity. Once you’re familiar with what an album is trying to do, you can go about the process of understanding, unpacking, and enjoying it. You’ve got the guide-map for how the work, well, works. 

(Some recent examples where I found myself with a very different set of expectations from the actual album include Beyoncé’s COWBOY CARTER, Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, and Lana Del Rey’s Did you know there was a tunnel under Ocean Blvd?.)

But the first listen of a Charli album isn’t just about setting expectations. It’s about rebuking them. Charli lies.

She creates false ideas of what her albums do (an important aspect in her role as pop critic, using the major label marketing machine to enforce expectations of her art only to elude them. But I will not go there!). During my first listen to her albums since 2019–Brat, Crash, how i’m feeling now, and Charli–the first thing I feel is cognitive dissonance. Charli was promoted as an experimental development on Pop 2. It has those abrasive moments, but it’s also bogged down by plenty of traditional, radio-friendly tunes. How i’m feeling now was made in quarantine to capture the experience of the moment. Instead, it’s about longing, doomed love, and anxiety. Crash was her “sellout” album, but it was still a bit too eccentric to really translate to the Peloton Playlists and radio payola of mainstream pop. 

And Brat? She’s screamed the conceit of Brat from the rooftops since she first posted the snippet of its lead single “Von dutch.” Brat is a club record. She promoted it as such: with a Boiler Room set, a pop-up at Williamsburg’s DJ booth The Lot, and with a music video depicting her as a confident and untouchable cool girl. This would be her love letter to the clubs, the raves, and electronic music she grew up on.

But Brat tells the same story that all her other albums do. It’s a depiction of extremes: between feeling confident and feeling like a nobody. From the hedonistic, self-assured partying to sharp, insecure, self-loathing. Charli has fans who adore her party-girl persona. They scream “Vroom Vroom,” “Speed Drive,” “Good Ones,” and all her other bops about driving fast and acting reckless. But there’s a yang to the yin, and her best songs are cathartic collisions between these two sides. I don’t really want a party record from Charli. That’s only one side of the story. The real thing that Charli XCX delivers is much more complicated and much more human. 

Charli’s latest release often feels the same way that Pop 2 does. The 2017 project distills the essence of both sides of Charli’s persona, sometimes on the same song. She switches from the downcast “Lucky” and “Tears” into cheeky “I Got It.” It’s unpredictable and volatile. Nostalgia doubles as regret. Partying is also a way to get lost in yourself.

Brat opens with “360” and “Club classics,” and she sounds more confident than ever (“I wanna dance to ME!” or “I’m your favorite reference baby”). But that confidence is fleeting. It pivots into suicidal ideation (“Why I wanna buy a gun/What I wanna shoot myself” on “Sympathy is a knife”) and isolation (“I might say something stupid”). Even the most structured pop songs take unexpected turns, veering into existential doubts, regret, escapism, and high-octane yearning. “Talk talk” reads like something from Crash, bright and polished with a four-on-the-floor beat. But it also races with insecurity.

Nor does Brat flow like a club record. “I might say something stupid” interrupts the momentum of the first three tracks with a sparse beat reminiscent of Radiohead. “I think about it all the time” butts in between the Ozempic-anthem “Mean girls” and the closing rave of “365.” On it, Charli ponders motherhood and her “ice cold” future. Brat interjects these stark and internal moments when the bangers get too hot. 

At the center of Brat is “Rewind” and “So I.” “Rewind” is thick, glitchy, and in-your-face. It’s the Brattiest sounding moment here, with heavy drums, shrill synths, and broken autotune that vibrates like a chainsaw. Despite this Brattiness, it’s plagued by “doubts that keep running through [her] mind,” about her weight, her appearance, her success. Midway through the song, it dissolves into a synth that calls back to Charli’s remix of Caroline Polachek’s “Welcome to My Island.” Even the most brash moment on the album can’t stay still in one song or one feeling. 

And then there’s “So I,” a song about Charli’s grief for SOPHIE which samples “It’s Okay To Cry.” It’s got one of the most devastating lines on the album: “When I’m on stage sometimes I lie/Say that I love singing these songs you left behind.” She’s referencing “Vroom Vroom,” which SOPHIE produced. “Vroom Vroom” is the epitome of the confident, “I’ll-kill-you-with-my-car,” hot-girl iteration of Charli. But even the apex of Charli’s “Bratty” tracks are complicated by loss, shame, and grief. 

Charli writes about the music industry more overtly on Brat, even more than on her “sellout” album Crash. There’s references to her rivals, her imitators, the commercial success she simultaneously wants but also doesn’t care about. But the music industry is not the center of Brat. It’s just the venue for her to write about these same emotions: braggadocious (“Von dutch”), self-doubt (“Sympathy is a knife”), and feeling utterly dwarfed by someone else (“So I”). 

With each successive album, Charli drives further and further into the paradox of being both a  pop star and a human: hot, adored, acclaimed, and obsessed over. Grieving, lonely, jealous, and hurting. In a way, Brat is the follow-up to Charli, her last album to alternate so viscerally between these two extremes. But Brat commits to those extremes more than Charli did. If anything about the album is “bratty,” it’s her unapologetic willingness to embrace every emotion, whether it's palatable for a pop star or not. She “does a little key/has a little line.” She looks “perfect for the background” and “goes so cold.” She “doesn’t wanna feel feelings,” but god-damn does it anyway. 

Brat is not a club album. Club-influenced? Sure. But not any clubbier than her previous work. Does it have tracks that could be played in the club? Yeah. If that club is Market Hotel and EASYFUN is DJing. Charli XCX has never made a true party record. And I hope she never does.