Charli XCX has been a celebrity for a long time, but she’s never been this famous—exposed enough that I don’t even really need to explain what the past few months have entailed for her. The question that’s lingered in the wake of the world-conquering success of her sixth album, BRAT, has been what she’d do with that newfound fame: Unashamedly chase a bag and put her name to a swath of ill-fitting collaborations? Write the requisite fame-is-hard record? Release an album of impenetrable noise?
Why not a little bit of all three? Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat is a Rolodex flex and a reckoning with fame and an album that features harsh noise and outright screaming—the platonic ideal of a collaboration-heavy pop remix record as well as one that’s Charli to its bones. Were I a newly minted star who’s spent much of the year performing and promoting and partying all the while, I might take the autumn to recuperate; Charli, currently losing a yearslong battle with workaholism, recorded new vocals for every track here, sometimes overhauling tracks to the point that I’m not sure they’d qualify under Billboard’s rules for remixes contributing to a song’s Hot 100 placement—which is generally the entire reason most A-listers release so many superfluous remixes.
That’s a crucial detail of this Brat remix record: It feels less like a way to keep “Brat summer” rolling than an attempt, on Charli’s part, to relocate her sense of self amid the memes, opportunistic co-signs, and critiques, both good-faith and bad. Like its sister album, it is unexpected, unfiltered, uncomfortably messy, and dizzyingly fun. Contained within Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat are monuments to friendships old, new, and repaired (“So I” with A. G. Cook; “Von Dutch” with Addison Rae; “Girl, So Confusing” with Lorde); link-ups with collaborators from songs you might have chosen to forget (Tinashe pops up on “B2B” a decade removed from “Drop That Kitty”); and real-time markers of Charli’s ascendancy (“Guess” with Billie Eilish). Lesser-known names like The Japanese House and Bladee are given just as much space as artists Charli has long admired (Robyn, Ariana Grande) and newcomers, like the young, gloriously bitchy Catalunyan rapper Bb Trickz. On paper alone, the variegated and very unusual guest list is a testament to Charli’s talents as a genre- and scene-agnostic A&R; if the title feels too unwieldy, maybe you can just call it Pop 3.
Like Pop 2—the clearest blueprint within Charli’s catalog for a project like this—Brat and… is raucous and reckless, and it’s really really sad. But romantic love isn’t a concern here. Instead, Brat and… siphons off some of BRAT’s primary fuel: the idea that fame is too potent, too damaging, and too deliriously intoxicating for any one person to deal with in a “normal” way.
The stakes are far higher now that my mum, your mum, and Ella Emhoff’s mum have all at one point self-identified as “Brat.” Seeing the most famous woman in the world at your boyfriend’s show, it turns out, is not as bad as hearing that your friends think you’ve changed; wondering if you should have a baby is even more agonizing when the album on which you wondered if you should have a baby becomes so successful that the next three years of your life are suddenly fully booked. Brat and… has the aesthetic of a victory lap—Ariana Grande co-sign, monumental first-day streams, weird activation at a bucolic outdoor Hudson Valley art center—but its lyrics are often even more shatteringly bleak than those on BRAT, that album’s many hypotheticals suddenly made viscerally real.
BRAT was one of Charli’s few records without features, a fitting mode for an album about how isolating it’s been for her to spend a decade drifting in and out of the mainstream. The guests on Brat and… were seemingly recruited with that sense of loneliness in mind: The 1975’s Matty Healy, Grande, Eilish, and Bb Trickz are lightning rods, forever singled out for their sharp tongues, fat mouths, and tabloid provocations; Bladee and Yung Lean make an aesthetic of alienation; Justin Vernon is indie music’s most enduring avatar of aloneness; Lorde and Eilish spent their teen years surveilled and scrutinized by the public and the media.
None of these artists have traversed Charli’s exact path, but they’ve all, in their own ways, had to reckon with their own stardom, their position in the industry, and the choice to chase easy success or follow their muse down the rabbit hole. Rather than fruitlessly try to foster relatability with her audience—who will never be as rich, famous, or exposed as her—Charli writes with surgical specificity, a welcome change from the platitudinal, patronizing I’m Just Like You vibe that’s become de rigueur lately. The flip side, of course, is that these songs do sometimes veer into one-percenter solipsism (“It’s a knife when you’re so pretty, they think it must be fake”) but they feel truthful in their mashups of folly and despair.
As ever, friendship is a salve. A simulated phone call between Charli and Caroline Polachek on the diaphanous, wintry remix of “Everything is romantic” is vulnerable and affirming, ominous comedown anxieties (“Did I lose my perspective? Everything’s still romantic, right?”) neutralized by the simple tactility of Polachek’s lyrics: “Late nights in black silk in East London/Church bells in the distance/Free bleeding in the autumn rain.” A. G. Cook’s fleet remix of “So I,” originally an apology and tribute to the late SOPHIE, becomes a paean to “all the good times”: “First time I ever felt alive on stage/In Texas, in matching latex/That’s as cool as I’m ever gonna feel.” Tinashe’s remix of “B2b” is one of the few unapologetic flexes here—a triumphant celebration that’s a welcome relief after a handful of songs that wear their discontent on their sleeves.
Partying provides some comfort, too—or at least a fun, fleeting high. Were you one of the many annoying dance music types who complained that Charli shouldn’t have described BRAT as a “club record”? Here’s a positively filthy EASYFUN remix of “365”—endlessly bootlegged after it premiered at that auspicious Boiler Room back in February—that samples Altern-8’s “Frequency.” And, for good measure, a sexy, stupid UKG track, courtesy of wifey, that braids “Club classics” and “365” and a deliciously insouciant Bb Trickz verse into the musical equivalent of one of those confusing but cunty Y/Project button-ups. Should we do a little key, should we have a little line? How about a whole snowplow’s worth?
It’s immensely gratifying that Brat and… swerves between modes—sad and hard, quotidian and glamorous—in this way. Pop has been quite boring in recent years, in large part because it’s been easy to predict where its top-tier stars will go next. Brat and… is both diabolically calculated and so off-the-cuff as to seem kind of guileless: ego and id getting caught in a barfight at 3 a.m. Rather than try to fit the expectations of how a pop star should act, Charli has taken exactly the right lesson from BRAT’s success: Nothing about this world makes any sense—so you might as well use your 15 minutes being as uncompromisingly weird as possible.
