Euronews Culture delivers its verdict on Charli XCX's sixth album 'Brat', a masterful attempt to recreate a night out in 15 tracks. Charli XCX is a chimaera of an artist these days. Her lockdown album ‘How I’m Feeling Now’ was an insight into her personal life and the way she responded to the restrictions of pandemic lockdowns.
She followed it up with brash commercially-focused ‘Crash’ in 2021 that was both a knowing wink at the industry and presented a self-imposed limitation on her more interesting musical identity. She has now returned with her sixth album ‘Brat’ and crafted something that leans into a club-scene aesthetic and wrenches her sound back into something more uniquely her. It’s a symphonic attempt to recreate the emotional turmoil of a massive night out, and it works.
It really works. Instead of relitigating her status within the industry here, let’s jump into it. ‘Brat’ kicks off with single ‘360’ that plays with her cultural placement as an “internet girlie” alongside characters like the chorus name-checked Julia Fox over an insistent rave beat.
This then segues into ‘Club Classics’, a straightforward hyperpop tune that continues to namecheck her producers and labelmates, including the late but continually influential SOPHIE. Like many of the songs here, even the overtly simplistic still glitches into a more complex shapeshifting tune. Everything here twists the basic premise of a club anthem into both a celebration of the cul.