The summer’s smash hit returns with an All Stars line-up…
"Article published in Clash Magazine. Author: Caitlin Chatterton."
Charli xcx’s sixth studio album hit 2024 like a runaway train. It was supposed to remain a cult classic: 2022’s ‘Crash’ was Charli’s extravagant bid for the mainstream; ‘brat’ was a return to the club. The now-iconic chartreuse cover was even a budget-conscious decision, made on the assumption that few people would care about her new record anyway.
It was never intended to galvanise the US Vice President’s election campaign; inspire think pieces in national newspapers; spawn endless viral memes, or take over from ‘Barbie’ as the summer’s ordained aesthetic.
But, while ‘brat summer’ has finally ended, the party certainly hasn’t. Keep your strappy white tops and your lighters out, and welcome to the stage: ‘brat and it’s completely different but also still brat’.
Reflecting the project’s loyalty to the dancefloor, remixes have been an intrinsic part of ‘brat’ from the start. Before the original album was even out there were remixes of its singles: ‘Von Dutch’, featuring Addison Rae, and ‘360’ with Robyn and Yung Lean.
Since ‘brat’ took off Charli’s also worked it out on the remix with Lorde (‘Girl, so confusing’); flung underwear around with Billie Eilish à la ‘She Looks So Perfect’-era 5SOS (‘Guess’), and gone multilingual with Troye Sivan and Dua Lipa (‘Talk talk’). These releases – as well as causing online frenzy – offered a taste of Charli’s approach to remixing her songs: instead of simply adding a new second verse, she’s taken the scissors to ‘brat’ completely, treating the original material more like a sample than a blueprint.
The rest of ‘brat and it’s completely different but also still brat’ follows suit. The Bb trickz version of ‘Club classics’ is a chopped up and abstracted reimagining; ‘Everything is romantic’ a sodden postcard of London life under Caroline Polachek’s influence. Julian Casablancas, meanwhile, takes the pouting, coquettish ‘Mean girls’ off its hinges entirely.
Piercing through the hedonism and sweaty ceilings of ‘brat’ 1.0 were shards of Charli’s personal insecurities and existentialism. They’re even more present on the remixes, balancing turbulent production with more nuanced vulnerability. Where before she worried about never hitting the big time, she now has to reckon with her sudden, breakneck ascent. “I’m fuckin’ tired, but I love it and I’m not complainin’,” she insists on the Tinashe remix of ‘B2b’; “Oh, shit, I kinda made it.” With Caroline Polachek she vents about feeling “smothered by logistics”, while together with Ariana Grande on ‘Sympathy is a knife’ they lament the perilous experience of being on top, set only for a fall. Her fears bleed into the new version of ‘I think about it all the time’, her now heightened fear of stopping the party to have a baby lifted to an atmospheric new space by Bon Iver’s contributions.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. On the fresh version of ‘So I’ – Charli’s tribute to SOPHIE – she and A. G. Cook flick through her happiest memories with the pioneering musician, painting vignettes of them wearing matching latex on a Texas stage and creating the cult phenomenon ‘Vroom Vroom’. Nearing the record’s end, Shygirl’s long-hyped appearance on ‘365’ falls short only in its length, delivering a clattering, thumping triumph. As after parties go, ‘brat and it’s completely different but also still brat’ is one for the books.
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