BRAT by Charli xcx: The new high everyone's raving about
Warning: Contains hyperbole, speaking on behalf of humanity and alleged unhealthy affection for a non-human entity. Listening to BRAT before or during is recommended for best results.
Recommended listening as you read:
Before publishing this, I have the feeling that I’ve somehow already reached the tail end of a “culture”-defining moment. What a testament to both this choppy and blaring album, and the “culture” (I put quotation marks because I don’t know how I’d really define that) in its over-saturated mediascape which gives you an endless stream of sensation(s) whenever you refresh your *anything* page now.
Charli xcx’s newest album, BRAT, is permanent and demands your attention. You can’t shy away from its pull. I have news: The call is coming from inside the house. Brat screams into the void and that void is you.
It’s an intangible drug. It is healing. It is therapeutic. It’s the high I try to edge through abstinence and palette cleansers (Billie Eilish’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT has similarly dominated my waking hours), but always fail to, crawling back each day for a sweet hit that delivers on command. It’s a hedonist’s excuse.
What I’m about to say is the epitome of my generation and this jacked up era. Ordinarily, I’d say I’m a good listener, but something strange has happened. When I talk to someone lately—the tranquil old lady serving me bread in the local corner shop, or recently, having the rare opportunity to practise my Spanish with native speakers—all I seem to hear in my head is the tear-jerking refrain: “Push my hair back, I look hot when I’m (bumpin’ that), No, I really don’t stop when I’m (bumpin’ that), Gonna jump when it drops when (I’m bumpin’ that), DIAL 999 IT’S A GOOD TIME WHO TF ARE U I’M A BRAT WHEN I’M—”
Need I go on? I want to, very much, because the train has left the station and I am aggressively bopping my head to what others would see as silence. Little do they know, there is the loudest club to ever exist right inside my head, whether I like it or not. Words should fail me but they don’t. If I dial 999, will Brat or Charli pick up? Are they one and the same? The mystery is agonising.
Anyway, I will try to restrain myself from spewing lyrics here, there, and everywhere until I have finished this piece. I’m beginning to think that reading and writing have banded together to save me from losing my attention span altogether. I’d be a different person without these outlets. Maybe, without them, I’d be at a weeklong rave in some friendly but cold garden shed somewhere in Greater Manchester instead of writing unhinged articles for my Substack (sorry to break the 4th wall there). Perhaps that would be fine overall, but it makes you think, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t have have escaped Brat’s wrath either way…
Oh, to be a little green alien visiting Earth for a day. Oh, to be Brat itself (herself?). This delicious lime disease. This beautiful off-fluorescent plague. This sickening cure. I’d like to, if you’ll allow, compare it the green light across Jay Gatsby’s bay. A symbol of hope, reliability, desire, and definitive unattainability…
We want Brat’s life, and for 41 minutes, we may truly believe we have it. Do I only go to the good restaurants and call up the paparazzi? Do I worry about Billboard? Have I casually gazed at Pompeii in the distance? No to all... But have I been “in a place that could make you change”? Have I ever wanted to rewind time? Why, yes Charli. I have. She knows me so well it’s almost scary.
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock itself, carrying as much career, peer and friend envy as blatant self-adoration and projection. I’ll stop before I whip out another A-Level English Literature banger to impress you with.
Where I do question my wits is when I’m trundling around the humble English countryside with only sheep to lock eyes with, and, upon gazing out at the verdant fields and trees which stretch out to the horizon, instead of letting my mind go quiet and allowing myself a rare interlude of reflection, I have the itch—nay, an unquenchable thirst—to proclaim aloud: “That is so BRAT!”, whip out my phone and edit that silly low-resolution logo onto God’s green pastures. This is not what any creator would’ve intended, surely. Brat is not entering those pearly gates under any circumstances. So then why is the music so celestial?
I’m not the only one who sees Brat everywhere, either. The colour has become synonymous with the album, forcing us all to think about it at several intervals throughout the day: causing the main spike of adrenaline upon watching the Euros and Wimbledon, watching a bus brush the curb as it tousles my hair, spotting a stray disposable vape in a puddle. It’s genius marketing to make a colour a brand. It’s our fault, really, for assigning these random things such meaning. But isn’t that the meaning of life itself?
“things I've seen in london this weekend that made me go "wow the brat promo is insane""
I digress.
No, let’s carry on.
Lime green is objectively the worst colour, and this is a dull lime green, but it now fills all my senses and has gifted me a sixth one. It’s the ecstasy and guilt of chugging Mountain Dew when you’re 12 on the school bus, wanting to ingest something that resembles toxic waste to rebel against your parents and impress your friends (or I imagine it would be—I lacked the friends necessary to pull this move). Sweet, cold, artificial, refreshing. It feels so bad for you but some deep-rooted trauma has been soothed even just for a moment. An ache dislodged. A taste of comradery. An audience to your biggest breakthroughs. That’s Brat.
Lime green sounds incredible. This album has given me the strongest sense of synaesthesia I’ve experienced since long before puberty came along, removed my neural elasticity and numbed my ability to select a favourite colour; before school and exams drummed out my creativity and stole my intuition. Brat has given it all back and more.
Brat is the new classic I can’t fathom we ever lived without. It may just solve 98% of our problems on any given day—or give us the illusion that it does—and by Jove, that might just be the best we can hope for sometimes.
It’s hard to believe that Brat and I followed the “enemies to lovers” arc. I know. Let me explain.
At first, it was so nasty, so abrasive, so obnoxious, those searing synths so unforgiving. This is fake music, my left brain must’ve told me, and so must be my enjoyment of it. This is where music could’ve avoided going, and has so far managed for the most part. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. People are going to debunk this album. I thought I’d enjoy Brat in passing, perhaps indulging in one or two songs in secret. I already knew I liked Von dutch, but a whole album of that? Obscene…
Now, upon growing up, I see it for what it is: an orchestra of harmonious symphonies lifting me up to heaven and gliding me through hell in a strip-lit handcart, the undulations fluctuating more starkly upon each listen. It encapsulates the human experience more than anything in history ever has or anything in future ever will. All I can say is: Thank you.
It is all the electronically adulterated monologues of Lady Gaga anthems but with a genuine Bri-ish™ accent. It’s the moody poshness of Lily Allen with a sweaty neon aura. It’s trashy and chic. It’s like a G6. It’s Surrey dressed as Bristol. It’s everyone’s best and worst side. It’s a ride in a tunnel; it’s a blunt stop at the lights. It’s water; it’s air; it’s land. It’s 1999, 2010, 2024 and 2038. It’s everywhere. It’s 365 days a year every year from now until forever. Brat is—if you’ll pardon the chronically overused but highly relevant reference—so Julia.
This is getting ridiculous. This masterpiece is undoing all programming in my brain and wiring it all at once, and I’m giving it the tools and showing it through the door.
The light-hearted part of this piece is over. I’m now going to talk about the healing powers of music to society and the confusing catharsis of crying to autotune. Writing this, I realise I’ve automatically been talking about this album as if it is own self-created entity. To me, this is unironically a sign of effective, resonant, ““““culture””””-defining art. It’s a success. Brat got away with it, and nothing—not your stubborn music taste—is going to change that.
I’ll hark back to my flash of anxiety about missing the Brat train (totally unfounded). In any case, Brat’s airwaves are not thinning, they are only growing and evolving with each listen, new meanings being applied every day. Video essays, “Chronically online girl explains Brat lore…”, and so on.
Mostly, it makes me want to go to the club, but exclusively Charli xcx’s version of the club. When I didn’t know any better, I heard a string of blood-sugar-increasing beats, but now each track has its own distinct taste. I can only assume the flavours have matured for some other people, too. I truly can’t wait to see how it ages throughout the years. Maybe it’ll turn out to be the joke of the century. In the event that that occurs, I’ll take one for the team. Just know that I won’t go down without a fight.
The soundscape concept for 365 is explained by Charli in an interview, and now I experience a full-length-feature-film-performance-art-Punchdrunk-immersive-theatre-piece in my head each time I brush my teeth. All for the price of a monthly Spotify subscription. It makes me feel like I’ve got away with something, too.
There’s a thin line between silly wee citizen and pure empowered genius and I am happy to teeter between them as long as the world crumbles around me. At least while the album plays… and replays…
Brat is changing the landscape as we know it, and not just the one I vandalise using the logo generator. It’s bringing the shoddy chaos we didn’t know we missed among a slough of clean-cut party music which seemed to reverberate from around 2013 to now and bully us into submission.
Last year, one of my favourite YouTube personalities, Sarah Baska, had a panic attack at a Coachella performance, of whose I won’t divulge out of respect to the artist. She said it was when the hit Summer started playing that it all became too much. Without her needing to explain, it made complete sense. Maybe the peak of my teenage angst was not caused by isolation, embryonic use of social media and hormones, but instead by the incessant release of hesitant violins and timid beats produced by vaguely European blokes with stubble.
(I’ll admit, I got carried away there. I’m not currently up to date with this artist’s facial hair status and I may have conflated him with David Guetta. I take it back, but I stand by what I said.)
Another warning: Remastered clichés ahead. Now, we shouldn’t cut off our nose to spite our face, or reach for apples ;) only to step on oranges, but when one kind of music gives you hives and the other cures your back problems and restores your serotonin for good, I think we can make these healthy observations. At least for now, I’d say that shedding tears to Brat is more of a release than an anxiety response, even if it does feel strange to sob while dancing and wrinkling your face at the groove. We’ll see how it fairs among crowds. Maybe it’ll be belated lockdown group therapy, or a celebration of club music becoming pop again.
2013 has had its time in the sun—that is until, inevitably, it is prematurely recycled in this accelerating conveyor belt we all seem to be tied to. Thankfully, Charli stuck around and built on what she started back then to keep us hurtling forward through fear instead of looking back in anger…
But who knows? Maybe today’s teens will stick their fingers in their ears to Brat in future for the same reason: It reminds them of being a teen.
Did I reach any conclusion during this post? Well, I couldn’t tell you. I’ve been listening to the tracks throughout so I have been firmly planted elsewhere. I had a great time and I hope you did too. I’ll come up with a resolution now to give you some reassurance that I haven’t wasted your time and attention: I’m a fantastic multitasker, but also: Give Brat a chance. Get to know her. It may do something for you, even if that’s confirm your allergy to it.
Maybe the opinion of a mere mortal like me won’t convince you, so try this for size: The “internet’s busiest music nerd,” Anthony Fantano, AKA theneedledrop himself, gave Brat a score of 10. His music taste is notoriously difficult to pin down, and he is very fussy. Surely that’s got to count for something?
If I haven’t persuaded you to dip your toes into the swamp, you’re a lost cause and I can’t help you. When all is said and done, it’s okay to be wrong. You’re still welcome to subscribe for more related and unrelated musings, though:
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