There are only a few days left before summer officially starts, but this season belongs to the Brats. In honor of Charli XCX‘s sixth studio album, green slime, going out and self-awareness has arrived.
The pop star’s June 7 release is also her highest charting single to date, debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 album chart. Charli isn’t the most talked-about artist of the moment, nor the one who rises above the others, but she has established her reputation as the one everyone loves to watch. Baby brother is the highest-rated album of 2024 on review aggregator Metacritic.
From the minimalist green album cover to the singer’s winding career that preceded it, Brat is different. In a sea of pop girls having a moment, Charli manages to define a moment without defining it.
How you might know Charli
Charli has been making music since the MySpace days of 2008. She first made waves on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2013 with “I Love It,” a rollicking collaboration with Icona Pop that reached No. 7. The following year she reached the top 10 with solo hit “Boom Clap” at number 8 and Iggy Azalea collaboration “Fancy” which dominated at number 1 for several weeks and was the song of the summer of 2016.
Charli hadn’t had a new Hot 100 hit in almost a decade, when he hit the charts with the Barbie Movie soundtrack. However, she remained busy during that time, releasing alt-pop and hyper-pop projects. She also wrote songs for other artists – “Señorita” by Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello and “Same Old Love” by Selena Gomez, to name a few.
Of Brat, Charli acknowledges that she is no longer aiming for mainstream success. As Vox’s Rebecca Jennings wrote in her album review, it’s about jealousy: how people envy her as a cultural influence, and how she envies other people. Many artists have been accused of copying her style – Katya Perry and Camila Cabello most recently.
“She’s a perfect channel for [recent trends] and she makes really good, really fun music that you can dance to while participating,” Jennings wrote. “She is a native of coolness, but unlike so many cool people, she can put into words what that feels like.”
Brat is not just popular. It is cool.
Pitchfork’s positive review of Brat notes that both Charli and her critics have long been obsessed with the idea of breaking out and becoming a Main Pop Girl.
“Then something changed, and it hardly seemed to matter. She had something they didn’t. She was cool,” Meaghan Garvey wrote.
From creating ultra-popular pop-up events in New York City to incorporating celebrity references into her lyrics, Charli’s album rollout has been enjoying viral success for weeks.
“I’m your favorite reference, baby,” Charli sings on “360,” before referencing multiple artists and influencers. For the song’s music video, she gathers girls such as model Gabbriette and Julia Fox, whom she also mentions in the song. Addison Rae, one of the most popular TikTokers, appears on the remix of her first single “Von Dutch,” and Lorde joined the remix of “Girl, So Confusing” to discuss her complicated relationship with Charli. She pays tribute to her late collaborator SOPHIE in “So I” and seemingly pays tribute to a certain New York influencer scene in “Mean Girls.”
Charli is engaged to George Daniel, the drummer of the 1975 band. Taylor Swift recently released an album that references her on-again-off-again romance with the band’s frontman, Matty Healy. Fans think Charli’s new song ‘Sympathy is a Knife’ is about Swift – and Charli had to urge the crowd to ‘please stop’ chanting ‘Taylor Swift is dead’ at her concerts.
What does being a “brat” mean to Charli – and to us?
“I want to provoke people,” Charli told Vogue Singapore in April. “I don’t do things to be nice.”
Being a brat is inherently bad behavior. On her latest album, Charli refuses to submit to the race to become the next biggest pop star, but repeatedly and confidently acknowledges her own influence on the culture. At the same time, she acknowledges her sadness and insecurity about her own life choices, from not being compatible with the people in her circles (in ‘Sympathy is a Knife’) to whether it would hurt her career if she had a baby (in ‘ I think about it all the time’). Society rarely allows women to be openly proud And sad. It’s a revolution.
Slate’s Scaachi Koul called the 2024 season “Big Brat Summer.”
“The themes colliding this summer – our indulgences, the sense of being over, a crushing sense of nihilism that has no remedy other than perhaps dancing in a smoke-filled basement – are perfectly encapsulated by Charli XCX’s new album Brat,” she wrote.
Charli herself told BBC Sounds Derived podcast about her vision for Brat Summer.
“It can be so messy – like a pack of cigarettes, a Bic lighter and a white strappy top with no bra. That’s really all you need,” she said.
TikTok creators have shared their personal takes on what a Brat Summer looks like for them: accessorizing your dog, sleeping with your makeup on, and ordering green drinks. Whatever your opinion of Brat Summer, it’s Charli’s world now and we’re just living in it.
