Sixteen months after Charli used Brat to air her anxieties about Swift, the US star’s graceless response is a missed opportunity for growth – and betrays her vengeful side

Charli xcx released her sixth album, Brat, on 7 June 2024. Within seconds of it streaming, fans had deduced that the song Girl, So Confusing was probably about Lorde: all it took was the line “people say we’re alike / They say we’ve got the same hair”, riffing on a 2014 video where Charli and an interviewer did a bit about people confusing the two. In the song, Charli laid bare her anxieties about their relationship and admitted: “Sometimes I think you might hate me.” Exactly two weeks later came the Girl, So Confusing Featuring Lorde remix, brokered by the pair over text and voice note in the days after Brat came out. On Lorde’s verse, she owned up to ghosting on dinner dates with Charli and exposed the self-hate, projection and industry-fuelled sense of pop-girl-on-pop-girl rivalry that had made her shy away from the friendship. Charli’s response to the text containing Lorde’s astonishing verse fairly summed it up: “Fucking hell.”

It established an immaculate playbook – for pop, celebrity meta-narrative, harnessing the speed of online discourse in a way that showed total fluency in how stans talk. That nimbleness is just one reason that the Charli diss song on Taylor Swift’s new album feels like such a terrible relic.