Sam Fang
Few artists can weaponize irony, self-awareness, and club beats like Charli XCX. With Brat, she didn’t just return to her chaotic pop roots… she finally turned them into a manifesto that was surprisingly heartfelt and introspective. Over a year later, the record feels like a time capsule cracked open from 2014 Tumblr and dumped directly into 2024’s hyper-digital landscape: glossy, appropriately bratty, unfiltered, and far smarter than it pretends to be.
Coming off years of being every pop fan’s guilty pleasure, Charli used Brat to stop chasing radio play and start defining the ‘post-genre’ generation. Green-coded and meme-fed, Brat became a record that thrives on contradiction: high fashion and low EQ, heartfelt vulnerability and nihilistic detachment, hooks that feel disposable but replay endlessly. It’s not an album that asks to be understood, and weirdly, it’s the one that the public seemed to understand the most.
The album’s opening track, ‘360′, sets the tone with brash self-love. Its singsong flow and confident lines (‘Legacy is undebated, you gon jump if A.G. made it’) establish Charli as both pop star and pop critic, playing herself and the culture all at once. It’s the perfect opener: instantly catchy, instantly quotable, and instantly brat.
Then comes ‘Club Classics’, a surprising early stumble into repetition. Its monotonous pulse feels more like a DJ loop than a full song…frustrating on first listen but almost hypnotic in hindsight. For diehard fans, its shoutouts to A.G. Cook and SOPHIE turn it into a eulogy disguised as a club track, even if casual listeners might bail before they realize it.
By ‘Von Dutch’ Charli hit her stride. The album’s most definitive statement, it’s a glitchy, swaggering anthem that solidified her as pop’s reigning cult classic princess. Ironically, this is the track that made her the most mainstream she’s ever been – proof that in 2024, being “brat” was the brand, even if it was so far removed from Charli’s usual motives.
Charli’s brat persona is built on confidence, but Brat’s best moments actually come when the mask slips. ‘Sympathy Is a Knife’ is sharp and unexpectedly raw, its rumored Taylor Swift shade serving as a smokescreen for something deeper: envy, insecurity, and the self-awareness that being Charli XCX means you’ll always be both insider and outsider. The later remix only sharpened its edges, but even here, it’s a relatable highlight, vicious and vulnerable in equal measure.
‘I Might Say Something Stupid’ keeps the introspection going but strips away the energy that defines the album’s sound. It’s sincere but slightly misplaced, a quieter confession in a record built on flashing lights, and perhaps the least Brat of them all.
Luckily, ‘Rewind’ and ‘So I’ find a better balance. The former explores aging and self-image with warmth, showing the kind of emotional growth her critics once said she couldn’t access. The latter, slower and poetic, rounds out a surprisingly introspective middle act and proves even pop’s brat can feel human under the club lights.
Like any typical club-focused album, when Charli leans into euphoria, Brat shines. ‘Talk Talk’ channels the breathlessness of new love with classic Charli soundscapes. It’s romantic, effortless, and pure serotonin.
‘Apple,’ the TikTok titan, encapsulates how modern pop is engineered for virality without losing musicality. It’s short, sharp, and instantly recognizable, and ultimately became an algorithmic anthem that somehow still feels authentic, even with its ridiculously short runtime.
‘B2B’ proves the repetition that plagued ‘Club Classics’ doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Its “back to back” mantra hypnotizes rather than feels like an ear sore, even if its beat does the heavy lifting – this time, it’s in a way that works. ‘Mean Girls’ plays comic relief the Brat way: its tongue-in-cheek Lana Del Rey shoutout reminded listeners that Charli has no plans to take anything too seriously, even when everyone else does.
By the end, Charli starts winding down. ‘I Think About It All the Time’ glows with early-2000s Britpop nostalgia, filtered through her modern, digital lens. It’s not the flashiest song on the album, but it’s refreshingly earnest and like a beautiful time capsule, a moment of stillness after the frenetic chaos of the rest of the album.
Closing track ‘365′ mirrors the opener in name and sound but doesn’t quite reach the same heights. It’s a neat conceptual bookend, though it feels more like an echo than an exclamation point. After the blistering energy of “360,” listeners might wish Brat ended with something riskier or more transcendent.
Is Brat the perfect record? Far from it. In retrospect, the album had multiple flaws – namely, occasional monotony, uneven pacing – but Brat still succeeded because it’s fully, unapologetically Charli. It’s self-referential, self-deprecating, self-mythologizing. It’s the kind of album that’ll age oddly well, precisely because its so tied to the cultural moment that it inspired. Love it or hate it, Brat is going to undoubtedly be one of those albums that escapes the 2020s and is still listened to for years and decades to come.
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