Charli XCX’s Brat is Abrasive, Absurd, and Irresistible: Review

Charli XCX’s new album Brat is not for the faint of heart. Don’t be fooled by the commercial-leaning pastiche of Charli’s last record Crash, which was arguably her most accessible album since her 2013 debut, True Romance. No, that Charli has been ran over — perhaps in “Speed Drive,” the haywire hyperpop cut from the Barbie soundtrack.

Instead, on Brat, Charli XCX gets her hands dirty. It hearkens back to both the Vroom Vroom, Number 1 Angel, and Pop 2 eras of Charli while also leaning into the neon-soaked hedonism of late aughts turbo pop. Those mixtapes she made with SOPHIE, A.G. Cook, and Easyfun weren’t just influential to the broader avant-pop movement, they clearly bear significance for Charli herself. She’s brought back the latter two producers for multiple tracks, along with her fiancé George Daniel. Brat aims to be both the Red Bull and the vodka.

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Charli XCX dedicated Crash to the late producer SOPHIE, with whom she made numerous tracks up until her death in 2021. But Brat sounds more indebted to SOPHIE’s work than its predecessor, and that’s not just including the gorgeous, heartfelt dedication of “So I.” There’re a lot of post-pop-style choices, moments of abrasiveness and dissonance, and cutting, hi-fi production, informed by the bombastic late 2000s sound that Charli has often sunk her teeth into.

“Von dutch” is like a bloghouse cut from 12 years ago that got dropped in a vat of radioactive sludge. The remarkable “Mean girls” is all David Guetta-esque turbo pop until the second chorus, where Charli isolates just a jazzy piano and builds the beat back up from there. A song fittingly dedicated to “the bad girls” containing one of the silliest, most dramatic detours on the album is exactly the kind of odd dichotomy Charli wants to capitalize on — tension and release, progression and subversion.