BRAT: Charli XCX Confessional Club World, An Overdue Review

“Bumpin’ that, bumpin’ that, bumpin’ that.” 

Two words that make up the ethos of the Brat-scape. Through a world-building lens, these two words feel like the whisper of a sweaty clubber on the dance floor. Its repetitiveness becomes a ritual where the listener hears it repeatedly, like a needy person would tug against your sleeve to demand something. In the club, a strobe light slows down the frame rate of movements around us. A green strobe light does the same, but now we’re transported elsewhere—a Brat world. 

BRAT took over the summer of 2024 with its confessional seance to fame, partying, insecurities, and brutal honesty. Up until the release date, Charli had done everything to abide by a record label’s rubric, as attested by her last album, CRASH, in which she utilized an A&R for the first time to create a complete “sell-out” era to please the masses and charts. After the success of CRASH came BRAT: a confessional, chaotic, electronic project featuring an album cover with an acid-green background and the word ‘brat’ in lowercase. Charli has always been an artist who goes against the grain. When she revealed the album cover, she relished the polarizing conversations on whether it was “lazy” or “innovative,” a perfect spectrum of responses that propelled BRAT into the limelight. She considered these reactions a reflection of fan greed and the unrealistic expectations set for female artists, which fall right into the theme of BRAT. The blunt nature of the album reflects a confident image of a pop star who is entirely self-aware.  Charli has paved a new path for pop music yet again, as both a voice for insecurity behind the music industry and as a narrator on the dancefloor. 

Marketed as a club record, the entire soundscape of BRAT plays out like a fantastic, chaotic bender. It is clear this project is meant to be felt through giant speakers, the flashiest strobe lights, and in the darkest basement dance floor until sunrise because the music is a maximalizing experience. It is a straightforward piece of art that grabs the listener’s hand and, much like trying to find your friends on the dance floor, pushes through a crowd of sounds to get to the ultimate finale: 365, only to want to relive it again. 

That was until the sequel dropped: Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat, a sister remix album in which Charli opens up the green room to multiple artists and pushes the conquering impact of BRAT to new territories. 

A bumping ring-tone guided by the flow of Charli’s intoxicatingly cocky lyrics, “360” marks the start of the album with the marketing illusion that Charli has created. It is a gossip-ey, bratty, and cocky sound sphere filled with brash self-indulgence and self-aware joy for fame and vanity. The remix includes Yung Lean and Robyn, who reshape the track to be a showboat triumph that sways the cockiness of the original into an earnest clap of one’s self-success. Joy drips out of the track like the innocence of three artist friends cheering on each other’s performance from the bleachers.

‍

‍

The second track on the album, “Club Classics,” keeps the listener in the nightlife space: “I wanna dance to me” Charli declares against a wubbing beat that feels like a heart racing against the music. As the listener travels from track to track, they realize how candid her club music is and how innovative Charli is in creating a project that plays out like a club-oriented coming-of-age film. The remix mashes lines from 365 and features Spanish rapper Bb Trickz, giving space for a new set of sounds that wreak even more havoc against club spaces.

 “Sympathy is a knife” is the first song that gives us a taste of Charli’s honest thoughts about jealousy. The track plays like a gritty spiral about comparison to someone who taps into her most inner insecurities. The anxious plea of the chorus screams through the listener's headphones: “I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” That anxiety turns into something else with the help of Ariana Grande on the remix. Charli cleverly constructed a new formulation for the track through the artist pairing. “Issa Knife” when you’re in the public eye and reeling from the excess of social culture’s voice buzzing in your ear. From a personal place to a public one, “Sympathy is a Knife” tells an evolving thesis that starts with candid thoughts in Charli’s head and expands into a plea over popstar anxiety.

In “Girl, so confusing,” Charli tackles a subject far broader than comparison and competition with another famous person: she deconstructs the pressure for female artists to be in infinite solidarity with one another for the sake of feminism. The track may reference a specific person, but the synthy grit lyrics reflect the truth of being pitted against one another in a highly competitive industry. Some may think it is a diss track, but it is not; it is just confusing to be a girl…

After the track dropped, the internet was imploding with questions about who the song could be about. Charli dropped a culture-shifting confrontational remix that gave the song a third eye. Lorde worked it out on the remix through an open dialogue filled with self-loathing, a direct conversation with Charli, and a final chorus that harmonized their voices and actively healed a wound they both were confused about. It’s that meta-ness that takes the artistry of BRAT to a place where the listener can relate to the rambling vent of the parent album and reflect on their thoughts through the progression of a confrontation. Charli holds a mirror to herself throughout every track, and sometimes, she flips that mirror to the listener.

‍

‍

What is not confusing is the confidence of “Mean Girls.” Hudson Mohawke’s production strobes against Charli’s lyrical description of today’s 'Internet It girl' and how society broods on them for being “Hedonistic with the gravel, drawl and dead eyes.” It is an unsanitized party anthem dedicated to girls who never subscribed to being a role model in defiance of society’s expectations of female artists. 

The real diss track of the album is the incredible lead single, “Von Dutch,” the showboating banger that welcomed the BRAT era. A strutting, cocky brag about being “the fantasy” that winks to celebrity culture but is entirely intentional at every moment as Charli repeats, “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me.” It is a colossal gut punch to everyone whose tongues cannot stop dripping with her name. The remix featured Addison Rae, who helped propel the track into internet virality through a TikTok sound that featured her showpiece scream from the remix.

Charli has said that her approach to songwriting in this album felt less like traditional pop writing and stanzas and more like texts sent to a friend. One example is “I think about it all the time,” which is one of the album's three “slower” songs where  Charli ponders the possibility of motherhood against the sacrifice of her freedom. 

‍

“Should I stop my birth control? ‘Cause my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all.” 

‍

It is a surprising track on the album that feels like the listener is stuck in the web of Charli’s racing thoughts while she goes out on a stroll. Her vocals are soft and talky, with an ambient digital beat behind them. The song transports the listener to a familiar melancholia when one thinks about all the alternative ways their life could change. The rawness of her songwriting shines on the other two slower songs, “So I” and “I might say something stupid.” “So I” is an emotional navigation of Charli’s grief for her dear friend SOPHIE and how her self-doubt burdened her urge to get closer to someone she found genial. “I might say something stupid” is a self-conscious track about being “famous but not quite.” It plays out like a depressing Uber ride home after a work party with everyone celebrating their promotions while you tell white lies to maintain your own status. .

The remixed versions of the three slower tracks either lament them in their ambient space or completely shift the mood into an opportunity to reminisce. “I might say something stupid featuring The 1975 and Jon Hopkins” is an ambient pool that Charli builds for Matty Healy to swim in and sink. Where Charli’s self-consciousness comes from playing the part of a wild pop star, Matty’s comes from his use of substances as a coping mechanism. The track gives almost all of its space for Matty to confide in the ambiance, where he can find reassurance over his mistakes like how his rambling tongue sometimes missteps and can get cut by a glass of wine. Jon Hopkins brings even more isolation to the original track, adding a dissociative ambiance.

“So I, featuring A.G. Cook,” recontextualizes the grief behind the original track. Rather than having a somber sequel, the track drips in interpolations of SOPHIE’s sounds, reflects on the good times, and brings a full glittering depth to the tribute. Grief is always tricky to tackle, but Charli’s genial choice to have A.G. feature on the remix is a crucial part of the memories she cheers on about. In the song, Charli recalls the first time she heard SOPHIE — her and A.G. were wearing matching latex and got into a crazy Uber, Charli story-telling the good times to lament the track as a montage of reminiscences.

“I think about it all the time, featuring Bon Iver” creates a grander celestialness to the original track, which felt like a stroll, and now feels like sprinting head-first into a cold lake with tears running down your eyes. In the eyes of successful fame, how deep is the mental toll? Charli talks about being locked into making an album and having hard conversations with her partner about their future. Bon Iver’s voice lays out the track for Charli to run harder on, away from her problems, and back around to face them like a loop of fear around a ticking clock. Charli’s melancholy magnifies into an ethereal bleed on this heartbreaking remix.

From grinding sound gears to somber melancholia to glimmery sunset beats, Brat epitomizes chaotic whiplash that never shies away from being blunt. Pieces of Charli’s mind diary swing back in with “Talk Talk,” a bouncy dance track about her experience with her fiancé at an award show, catching glances at one another, texting across the table, and finding ways to bump into each other without taking the initiative to talk. It is a bright, electronic wave that winks at someone across the room and ponders ways to formulate the approach. On the remix, Troye Sivan lends his hand to make the song his anecdote of the same thesis. A thump-ier house beat behind the entire track, with Dua Lipa offering voice notes in Spanish and French about a party at her place. It’s a fruitful euro track that blares in every house party.

“Everything is Romantic,” an ode to loving Italy, is a textural masterpiece of club whiplash. It starts with classical chords, moves into a thumping funk beat where Charli spits out lines that materialize the world around her and spins into a single laser beat where Charli declares that everything she just said is romantic. It ends with a soft rain patter against a window, concluding that the trip has ended and we just endured it with her like a sonic montage of a love-struck summer trip we all wish we had. On the remix, Charli reinvents the track by putting a question mark at the end of “Romantic?” Caroline Polachek wails her sweet siren melodies against a more rainy atmosphere that twinkles in the phone call portion of the track. The parent track showcases her magical trip to Italy, while the sister track is about the spiral phone call after the trip has ended over whether things were romantic. Caroline and Charli exchange an open dialogue with one another on the track, like whispers of a trusted presence to hold hands with when times are tough.

At some point, the green strobe light flashes so hard that the listener's eyes are ready to roll back indulgently, especially on tracks that echo club escapism. “B2b” is a sweaty dance track illuminated by Gesaffelstein’s grime production. Charli repeats “back to back” many times in the first minute and a half of the song, creating this tranquil slow-motion space as the song approaches the drop. That trance makes you feel like every time the light strobes, you could be the only one on this dance floor.  But as the strobes pump out slowly, it ignites a drop that sends a strobe across the dance floor like a whipping flame, plummeting us back into the world of a sweaty dance club. The escapism retreats into a punchy tell-tale on the remix. Charli and Tinashe bounce their verses against each other like a volleyball, discussing their hard work to get to this position. References to their original hits, “Boom Clap” and “2 On,” only to come back around with BRAT and “Nasty.” It’s a clever reinterpretation of the words “back to back” to showcase their grueling workaholic modes as pop sensations and how they rightfully, a decade later, blew the fuck up once again.

The Deluxe track “Guess” is a party anthem produced by The Dare that showcases Charli’s cheekiness as she flirts with people’s perception of her. It’s anthemic on the shield of being hot and unbothered. It winks like “Von Dutch,” boasting Charli as a wordsmith, molding sensuality into a hard electronic track that bites the faces of those with no perspective on her intentions. On the remix, Charli lends Billie the green room to explore her voice within an electronic club soundscape, and find confidence in her coming of age. Charli acts like a trusted shield for Billie to bounce those cheeky lines against one another, creating a flirtatious electronic surge built for ripping off a shirt on the dance floor.

“365” is the finale of BRAT and an electroclash thesis of the entire BRAT world, the green strobe light completely possessing the listener. It calls back to “360” with the same production at the beginning of the track, but instead of the lyrics being about having an untouchable impact on pop culture, they are about being the most impactful part of the party: “Who the fuck are you? I’m a brat when I’m bumpin’ that.” A.G. Cook and Cirkut’s production builds a razor-sharp, dirty acid beat that fluctuates in the brain like you’re about to hit the peak. When the final drop is only a few seconds away, the production morphs and shifts into echoed whispers of Charli’s voice: pitch sounds resembling birds flying from trees at 6 am as we implode to a digital explosion of a beat drop. It is a montage of the party spinning against our eyes in pure chaos. The remix with Shygirl, a sultry club vixen perfected for the track, brings the colossal ending to an even more bolstered finale. Easyfun’s club imploding drop with Charli’s dizzying “365” spitting repeatedly like planet  Brat-scape is bursting open, and a feast of digital sounds acting as meteors are hailing against the earth. Charli’s not only created a confessional club album but a zeitgeist that could double as an epic coming-of-fame and age that cinched its mark on the culture in every form possible.

As we slowly stumble away from the Brat world, we see the ripped shirt against the fence, the broken glasses, the bloody noses, and the stomped cigarettes. The green strobe lights start to leave our eyes, and we hear one final line from Charli, a line that winks at the album’s replay value. A line that will forever narrate every strobe in a green light. It’s a marvelous artistic movement with a mantra that will infinitely stand the test of time:

 Bumpin’ that.

‍

If you enjoyed this article, sign up to our newsletter and follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn to stay up to date with Gen Admission 🎶