Maybe some people look at Sophia, the world’s first robotic citizen, and feel optimistic about the endless horizon of potential, both technological and human; I look at Sophia and feel an unsettling sadness. There is something profoundly tragic in her existence, a sense of uncanny anti-natalism that triggers a strange empathy for those who also did not ask to be born. Sophia has sharp cheekbones and golden eyes, molded in the likeness of Audrey Hepburn. Her bald head opens at the back to unveil a disturbing metal cap that hides the whirring mechanics within her skull. Through knee-jerk millennial instinct, that vulnerable bald skull always flashes me back to those unforgettable photos of Britney Spears at the gas station in 2007—head freshly shaved, eyes blank and wild, umbrella wielded as a machete. It is the image of a woman who has decided to finish the job the world started: complete disassembly.
Charli XCX knows this trope—the glitched-out femmebot, programmed for love—all too well. She grew up on Britney and the Spice Girls, then joined Myspace and catapulted into the brash, neon-tinted world of bloghouse and Hype Machine electro. After spending her early teens performing in big sunglasses and blonde wigs at DIY London raves, she signed to Asylum Records at 18 to live her pop star dreams. With the massive success of Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” (both co-written by Charli) alongside her first solo hit, “Boom Clap,” her mainstream crossover seemed like a given, ready whenever she was. Instead, she doubled down on the weirdo Tumblr-core mixtapes she used to release for free, linking with post-post-modern bubblegum bass crew PC Music to try and figure out exactly what kind of artist she wanted to be. “Go fuck your prototype/I’m an upgrade of your stereotype,” Charli purrs on “Femmebot,” a cut off her latest tape, Pop 2, before her humanoid vocals stutter and short-circuit. Or as Robyn put it seven years prior: “Fembots have feelings, too.”
Pop 2—the best full-length work of both Charli and PC Music’s respective careers—is the antidote to the overwhelming monotony of the 2017 pop charts. It’s Charli’s second mixtape of 2017, which, calling your project a “mixtape” is a pretty negligible move these days, especially if you’re putting it up for sale. But for Charli, who’s been expressing herself in the format since before it was cool, there’s a meaningful distinction: albums mean compromise; mixtapes mean total creative freedom. As streaming services render organic music discovery obsolete, and as major label A&R decisions feel increasingly like a demented cross-promotional Mad-Lib of someone who has heard approximately four rap songs, Pop 2’s sprawling, thoughtful mass of guests—from Brazilian drag queen/vocalist Pabllo Vittar, to Estonian emcee Tommy Cash, to Hollyweird-via-Cologne pop conceptualist Kim Petras—put me on to no less than five artists I’d never heard of before. Because Pop 2’s not really about Charli XCX, Pop Star Extraordinaire; it’s an uninhibited, anti-algorithm vision of what pop music could be.
It’s not just the guest roster that sets Pop 2 so apart from the mainstream pop landscape, it’s the way these voices are integrated, making its 10 tracks feel less like a cool-kid curation project and more like a popping afterparty you’ve stumbled into. On “Out of My Head”—the kind of song that makes you want to slam a Strawberita and dance all night—Charli doesn’t show up in the mix until the second verse, giving the spotlight to Swedish bloghouse revivalist Tove Lo and Finnish trop-goth ALMA. By the bridge, the three voices have braided together almost imperceptibly. And on “Backseat,” an instant night-drive classic (and a fever-dream collab for anyone who replies to celebrity tweets with “mom”), Charli and synth-pop sweetheart Carly Rae Jepsen exchange verse and hook duty before coming together as one voice, howling “All alone, all alone, all alone” in unison. These are huge, emotionally climactic songs, with soaring melodies and bass that sounds like the shifting of skyscraper scaffolding. But there’s something doomed and loveless in the air, too; on Pop 2, romantic love is fun but fucked and partying is an emotional refuge.
It’s Pop 2’s production, more than anything, that places it on the vanguard of a complete stylistic breakthrough, thanks largely to PC Music’s A.G. Cook, whose credit appears on every song. I was skeptical of the label’s high-concept art school antics when they first emerged; but the further they’ve gotten from the Web 1.0 shtick, the more vital the collective’s impeccable, poignant pop futurism has become. And though Pop 2 sounds like the future, even more delightful is the way it hybridizes sounds from the past two decades of weirdo electronics: the synthetic maximalism of Rustie and HudMo, heartfelt late ’90s Eurodance a la Aqua or DJ Sammy, Crystal Castles’ goth electro-scuzz, J-pop super-producer Yasutaka Nakata’s wistful Shibuya-kei, Cher’s “Believe,” and of course, Britney, from Blackout to Britney Jean. And though it’s by now common practice for pop stars to flirt with hip-hop production, the results often reveal a cynically low level of engagement with the genre—tacking on “Metro Boomin-Type Beat,” some 808s, and calling it a day. Here, Charli and A.G. Cook know exactly what they’re going for: the “Versace”-style repetition on alien posse cut “I Got It”; the pristine, sultry chords, reminiscent of Late Nights With Jeremih on “Out of My Head”; the slurry, decayed cadences on “Delicious,” calling to mind Travis Scott or Swae Lee.
The strangest and most uncannily similar stylistic comparison to Pop 2, though, is former “Teen Mom” Farrah Abraham’s outsider opus, My Teenage Dream Ended. Sweepingly ridiculed as one of 2012’s worst albums, that judgment, five years later, feels wildly narrow-minded. It is a baffling work, to be sure: frantic layers of dubstep, EDM, witch-house, and breakbeats seem to run in the opposite direction as Abraham’s absurdly AutoTuned narratives about surviving the death of her husband. (In a recent interview, the album’s producer, Frederick M. Cuevas, admits that Abraham recorded her diaristic lyrics before ever hearing the music.) After my first full spin of Pop 2, I couldn’t shake the thought: “This sounds like Farrah, but good.” The album’s vocal processing is unlike anything I’ve heard in pop; Cook’s aggressive, evocative filtering has the paradoxical effect of heightening the humanity of it all. On “Lucky,” the tape’s saddest, wildest song (whose title cannot be understood without an implicit nod to Britney, whose own “Lucky” was her first of many explorations of the soul-sucking side-effects of stardom), Charli’s voice warps from anthropomorphic pan flute to rogue AOL dial-up tone to primal scream from the soul. When she sings, “You got no reception, you’re breaking up,” her voice gently stutters like it’s just out of service range, a subtle but brilliant touch.
But the tape’s best moment is saved for last. Unceremoniously titled “Track 10,” the song glitches into focus as if beamed in from interstellar broadband. Charli’s hyper-filtered melodies float over a celestial synth choir, building into a densely-layered collage of her own voice, howling at the moon until their vocal chords go ragged. Halfway through, the track explodes into ecstatic drums and vocal effects from Lil Data, a PC Music artist who uses a program called TidalCycles to compose via code. Far from the pristine perfection of PC Music’s early releases, there’s something a bit messy about the whole thing—a sense of humanity, beaming plainly from its hyper-synthetic surroundings, that feels like a revelation.
