Charli xcx - Brat

Heartthrob

Heartthrob



Brat landed at #7 on Pitchfork's best albums of the decade list. It's once again the second best placement from this year, after Cindy Lee's Diamond Jubilee (#3). Here's the write-up:
Some great artists have to crash and burn before they can truly thrive. Charli XCX just had to Crash. Her chart-topping 2022 album could have been the perennial underdog’s springboard out of pop’s middle class. Instead, she side-eyed the path of major-label A&Rs and mass-market compromise. Was Charli XCX really a radio-friendly unit shifter, or was she more of a…

Brat. The word is now more meme than noun, perhaps more color than concept. My brain is assailed by visions of a friend’s bootlegged, lime-green ‘brat’ baseball cap, or poppers huffed over a fresh puddle of festival vomit, before it recalls whatever the word used to mean. It was an album of cathartic, ecstatic excess, and a “Brat Summer” of conspicuous transgression. Brat at large was a drunk genie in a vodka bottle, who could only grant you infinite serotonin by making the world five percent more annoying.

A decade of cult acclaim had granted Charli a captive fanbase, happy to tag along with anything from bloghouse throwbacks to future-pop bacchanals from producers like A. G. Cook and Easyfun, not to mention a chapbook of in-jokes and mononymous namedrops. Her lore encompassed not only the pop princess but also the club maven and the Tumblr poet, the it girl and the over-it girl. She could brag, pine, and bristle while sounding just like her honest self. It was creative élan, not marketing nous, that made the memification inevitable: Without Charli’s reckless self-belief—her chatty insolence or eye-rolling rejection of pop relatability—Brat would not have become a byword, or excuse, for trashy thrills and middle-class decadence, nor a symbol of youth savvy, crowbarred into increasingly ill-fitting political campaigns. It would never have become, as these things often will, a useless buzzword for anything naughty or bright green. Brat Summer would never have died, but its most grateful acolytes would never have lived. –Jazz Monroe
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