Album Review: Charli xcx - Brat and it's completely different but also still brat

A remix album in every sense of the word, British singer Charli xcx’s latest project rips the armour off of her blockbuster record Brat released earlier this year, burrowing itself under that album’s skin to deliver a fascinating treatise on fame, self-doubt and the life of the ‘partygirl’ all while subverting the traditional remix album formula. Where it would have been easy to swap in a new guest verse on each song, xcx and her collaborators instead treat the original album like a lump of clay ripe for moulding. The resulting project is her most experimental, unpredictable, thematically evolved work since 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now.

Sonically, the album (mostly) still has its feet on the dancefloor and its hands in the air. The stone-cold banger ‘365 featuring shygirl’ is the musical equivalent of doing ten Jägerbombs in as many seconds. ‘Guess featuring billie eilish’ starts as a cheeky come-on and ends as a full-blown rager. I would be remiss not to mention the pure ecstasy rush that the one-two punch of the ‘Talk talk’ and ‘Von dutch’ remixes deliver. Most intriguing is the rework of ‘Club classics’, featuring a breathless verse from Spanish rapper Bb trickz. This remix chops up the original song, fuses it with lyrics from ‘365’ and ‘B2b,’ then dials the energy up to eleven, creating an instant classic all its own.

Like Brat 1.0, these songs beg to be heard in a strobe-lit room with sweaty strangers. But the lyrics suggest that xcx also has her mind on life after the club: the afterparty; the taxi home; the morning after. ‘Rewind featuring bladee’ and ‘Apple featuring the japanese house’ each pick up where their counterparts left off. The former yearns for the simplicity of the past and the latter further explores complicated family dynamics. ‘So I’, which has xcx’s longtime collaborator and hyperpop mastermind A.G. Cook on production, turns the original song – a melancholic eulogy to the late visionary producer SOPHIE – into a celebration of ‘all the good times’ that unfolds like a kaleidoscope of memories. It’s the most affecting moment on the record.

…her most experimental, unpredictable, thematically evolved work since 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now.

For all the album’s chaotic hyperpop leanings, there are a fair few downtempo cuts. But xcx manages to bend the tracks just enough into the Brat Venn diagram that it still feels cohesive. ‘I might say something stupid’ is a spacious, tranquil piece featuring Jon Hopkins on piano. One imagines guest singer Matty Healy singing the anxious lyrics of self-doubt to himself in the mirror after the party, still half-drunk off cheap whiskey. ‘I think about it all the time’ is a wintry, beautiful ballad where Justin Vernon’s haunting vocals elevate the lyrical themes (the ever-relatable panic of running out of time) into a transcendent meditation. It is one of xcx’s most emotional songs to date.

The highlight of the record is also its most surprising moment. Where the original ‘Everything is romantic’ was an epic ode to Aperol spritz, casual flings and summer in Italy, avant-pop singer Caroline Polachek turns it on its head for the remix, sending an essay-length text from rain-soaked London. She conjures images of ‘six-pound wine’ and being ‘hungover on Tokyo time,’ trading lines with xcx about self-doubt and friendship. These lines make it less of a song and more of a red-eye text conversation where Polachek offers a hand to her ever-worrying friend. The original was so wide-eyed and brimming with joy in its certainty that ‘everything is romantic.’ Now the statement becomes a question (‘everything is romantic, right?’), and suddenly the joy of simplicity and love has become fleeting and out of reach.

This remix album, and the Brat era as a whole, is unquestionably Charli xcx’s magnum opus.

Much of the record (in the same way that many of her records have always seemed like a response to something) deals with xcx’s fear of change, part of the fallout of Brat’s runaway success which propelled her to a new level of pop stardom. On ‘Rewind’, ‘Everything is romantic’ and ‘B2b’, she muses about conflicting feelings: the gratitude that her hard work at the cutting edge of pop is finally being recognised, the exhaustion that comes with a lengthy album rollout & touring schedule, and the simmering desire of even more fame. Similarly on ‘I think about it all the time’, xcx sings of being ‘locked into the promo’ and how her desire to settle down clashes with her trajectory of being a huge pop star. The knife is twisted with the line ‘But there’s so much guilt involved when we stop working / ‘Cause you’re not supposed to stop when things start working.’ On this album, no one – not toxic Twitter stans or journalists who love to misquote for clickbait – is a bigger enemy to xcx than herself. Pop stars, they’re just like us!

This remix album, and the Brat era as a whole, is unquestionably Charli xcx’s magnum opus. Not just because the music goes insanely hard or because the collaborations are discourse-obliterating (I have yet to mention the career-best features of Lorde or Ariana Grande), but because its lyrics have its creator adapting in real time to its success. The gratitude is there, but so is the panic that she will never be this ubiquitous or make an album this good again. She winces at the prospect of sacrificing her personal life for the sake of her art (as so many pop stars are expected to do), but what to do when she has a shot at cementing her name in the history books? Ironically enough, Charli has never been more relatable than when she is at the top of her game. She just wants to live that life; don’t we all?