Charli xcx – BRAT

In the summer of 2021, between the release of her pandemic-era do-it-yourself project how i’m feeling now and Crash her self-described ‘major label sell-out record’, Charli xcx wondered aloud with declarative intent whether hyperpop might be dead. Yet while Crash eschewed the maximalist tendencies of the label, with its bubblegum snap, goody bag choruses, compressed vocals and sickly synthetic sheen, trading instead in crunchy eighties power pop with funk stylings and a sometimes tender tread, in truth how i’m feeling now had already put the cap on the genre with its atypically raw emotional candour, breathy voice messages and fan collaborations, and a real sense of creeping quietude and sober pensiveness which captured the tenor of the moment amid all of the one-arm-reaching-out, dancing on my own, kaleidoscopic ferris wheel mayhem.

After adorning old robes and playing the diva, Brat proves a tight little raver whose labour-intensive fifteen songs belie a shifty minimalism. Turning back the dial to some of her own past experiments as well as the club music of her youth, the album revisits electroclash and French house in the vein of artists like Peaches and Alan Braxe while also evoking both lyrically and sonically the insular scabrousness of My Teenage Dream Ended by Farrah Abraham and Yeezus.

Bounding out of the gates with ‘360’, which immediately posits Charli xcx in the middle of a pop-cultural maelstrom, whose retrograde music video longs for a bit of the simple life while featuring the multi-hyphenate models, actresses and influencers Chloe Cherry, Julia Fox, Rachel Sennott, Emma Chamberlain, Hari Nef and Alex Consani plus the enduring itness of the slubbily ethereal Chloë Sevigny, on ‘Club classics’ the artist and her longtime collaborator A. G. Cook dive deeper into the pit, on a track whose bouncy bass and synths carry an over-revved quality which calls to mind the recent efforts of Vladislav Delay in the form of his five-part extended plays Dancefloor Classics and Hide Behind The Silence.

‘I might say something stupid’ is a snagging ballad and the singer repeats ‘I’m your number one’ on the insistent and rotorised ‘Von dutch’, as part of a collection which is much more intimate than the bombastic release cycle would have it appear. ‘Rewind’ offers a bargain basement list of self doubts, elevated by her penchant for euphoric kicks and snappy hooks yet explicit in its prosaic mundanity. Through fractured guilt, ‘So I’ pays tribute to SOPHIE and the sweetly crabby ‘Apple’ runs from rot in the tree, while the cut-up melody of the Brat standout ‘B2b’ is hopelessly buoyant.

Then the penultimate track ‘I think about it all the time’ concerns a brisk visit to Stockholm where she meets a friend’s newborn for the first time, as Charli xcx contemplates the practicalities and wider prospects of parenthood, wondering whether she should stop her birth control and dipping a toe into early-thirties anxieties before a reprise of ‘360’ reels with more of an undertow as the singer at least for now keeps on bumping.