By Angelika Santaniello
When we think of pop music nowadays, our minds tend to reach for singles with fleeting success and repetitive choruses. Brat, Charli XCX’s sixth studio album, creates an antithetical suggestion. Through her hyper-pop album and consequent remixes, Charli XCX has marked the return of a subgenre that balances pop’s personalised subject matter with energetic, even electronic, sounds. Is it the way Charli XCX embraces a form of musical eclecticism? Or is it how she portrays the complexity of a ‘Brat’ lifestyle to give listeners the true pop experience?
What defines Brat is not a specific sound, but rather the vibrancy it inspires; we are captivated by the album’s simultaneously cyclical, yet disjointed aural journey. Magnetic tracks characterised by percussion-based electronic beats (Von Dutch, Club Classics) propel listeners’ vigorous desire to experience Charli’s music. However, we see deeply personal subject matter and slower tracks – such as Apple, Sympathy is a Knife and So I – cleverly embedded between more animated pieces. The album also mirrors the experience of a vivacious night out, depicted by the recurring melodies of 360 and 365. It is this melange of different musical elements that allows us to conclude that Brat embodies pop.
One may wonder: what has made Brat more successful than other 2024 albums, namely Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department and Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft? Arguably, it is not only the album’s distinct disco rhythms and staccato lyrics that have been enmeshed in the colloquial lexicon. Brat, its remixes, and Charli XCX’s successive album this summer (Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not) has transformed into an umbrella encompassing the return of dynamic, escapist music.
This becomes clearer when listening to Brat in conjunction with other notably successful pop music released this summer. In Sabrina Carpenter’s album Short n’ Sweet, we see a similar focus on upbeat rhythms and stripped-back lyrics, as Carpenter takes listeners through an experiential journey enveloped in escapist, lively pop. Pairing Carpenter’s album with Brat tracks, like Girl, So Confusing, and Rewind, listeners don’t only want to dance, they want to share the energy and identity of the speakers.
Brat’s impact extends to rising artists, facilitating their pop breakthrough, as is with former social media influencer, Addison Rae. The success of Charli XCX’s Von Dutch remix, featuring Rae, significantly shaped her identity as a musician, distinguishing her from a stigmatised social media career. In her single, Diet Pepsi, we see an artist more closely aligned with the image of the speaker in Brat. Rae’s single is bold, sensual while boasting a similar dynamism as expressed in both Short n’ Sweet and Brat.
Perhaps Charli XCX’s album has revitalised the “365 party girl” in all of us, listeners and artists alike. The album has fundamentally paved the way for a return to escapist pop music that is deeply personal while rejecting sombre introspection. But will this be a trend or something that continues for merely the next 365 days?
Illustration by Luoyi Shen
