BURSTSmart, funny, moving and full of big tunes, the in-your-face masterpiece was the right album at the right time, striking a cultural nerve and defining the changing zeitgeist
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In 2022, Charli xcx released Crash, an album that she claimed was a deliberate “sellout”. An artist who had previously seemed hell-bent on singlehandedly dragging pop music into a more interesting, experimental space by sheer force of will – on her acclaimed 2017 mixtape Pop 2, she collaborated with Estonian “post-Soviet” rappers, Brazilian drag queens and the extravagantly foul-mouthed underground artist CupcakKe – had apparently decided not to bother any more. She gamely presented Crash as another experiment in “making a major-label album the way it’s actually done” and knowingly embracing “everything that the life of a pop figurehead has to offer in today’s world – celebrity, obsession and global hits”, but you somehow sensed her heart wasn’t quite in it. Moreover, it didn’t totally work – it was well reviewed and became Charli’s first UK No 1 album, but didn’t exactly produce “global hits”.
What Charli subsequently described as a deadening experience lit a fire under its author: if playing the game was no fun, then why not do exactly as you please? Certainly, Charli xcx’s sixth album turned out to be everything Crash wasn’t, up to and including the defining pop album of the year. Instead of a sleeve featuring the singer in a bikini, as Crash did, Brat came wrapped in a blunt, lowercase rendering of the album’s title against a sickly lime green: intended as a snub to the “misogynistic and boring” assumption that a female artist should automatically appear on her own album cover, it turned out to be a masterstroke of branding far more pervasive than any glossy photo, even influencing the US presidential race. Its sound was brash and aggressive, early 00s London club music – electroclash, acid-y bloghouse, dubstep, maximalist rave synths – shot through a chattering, trebly hyperpop filter: “Club classic but I still pop,” as Von Dutch put it. It oozed self-possession and confidence, Brat seemed to swagger even as Charli confessed to insecurity or inadequacy, a cocktail of emotions that seemed to be at the album’s centre: if everyone feels like this, you might as well own it.
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