Charli XCX’s Brat: Texturally brash and genuinely affecting, the pop icon’s new album is a must-hear. Credit: Charli XCX, Brat We’re about three minutes into Charli XCX’s dizzying sixth studio album Brat when she states, for the record, “When I go to the club, I want to hear those club classics.” It arrives in the midst of a spiralling, pulverising beat supplied by her close friend and longtime collaborator, A.
G. Cook. The mix is almost overwhelming, as Charli runs through a roll-call of loved ones she wants to dance with: her boyfriend George (Daniel, of the 1975), Cook, and her late, great friend and producer Sophie.
Charli just wants to dance and, luckily for her, everyone else does, too. Brat arrives as the highly anticipated follow-up to Crash , the 2022 album on which the singer born Charlotte Aitchison shot for the charts (in her own way) with varying degrees of success. Crash marked the end of the five-album record deal she signed with Atlantic when she was just 16.
Aitchison is 31 now, and the past decade-and-a-half is littered with sporadic commercial hits ( After the Afterparty , Boom Clap , the Icona Pop collaboration I Love It ) that sit alongside critically acclaimed, groundbreaking pop music like the Vroom Vroom and Pop 2 mixtapes. Those mixtapes – made alongside the visionary Sophie, who died in 2021 – still sound 20 years ahead of the curve. Charli’s deep hatred of the major label system, of having her art and life dictated by a boardroom o.