Favorite albums of 2024: Brat

Entry #2

Arguably Charli XCX’s best record, Brat was immediately embraced by the general public after its slow-burn rollout. Maybe, a little too much.

Brat condenses 2000s (and some 2010s) pop trends into a nice little package. Every base is covered, whether it’s synth driven club bops or piano ballads about vulnerable feelings. It’s well sequenced and dumb fun, with nods to the MySpace era, looks back at the heroin-chic diet habits and the 2000s favorite club drug, cocaine. It’s glitzy in some parts and full of bangers that pay homage to other pop girlies, like Marina and the Diamonds and Britney Spears, without ripping them off.

Charli is both vulnerable and closed off throughout Brat, offering bits and pieces about her thoughts on starting a family and complication with female friendships (let’s work it out on the remix) in between bumps of cocaine in the forms of pumping bass. She even takes a moment to remember her late friend SOPHIE, whose fingerprints and influence are all over this thing, in a bitter and understated song on the back half of the album. Two songs later she’s taking the listener down an audio wormhole on “B2b” (backtobacktobacktobackbackbackbackbackback) like she wasn’t about to make us cry a few minutes ago. It’s feminine, it’s brash, it’s shameless, it’s ugly, it’s fun. It’s brat.

Still, somehow the album is also the poster-child for 2024, TikTok dances, poorly written thinkpieces on “brat summer” and a failed Democratic candidate’s campaign. It’s known as the soundtrack for a derivative of “Hot Girl Summer,” another term that we manage to keep dragging throughout the 2020s, now unrelated to its originator. It’s become one of those cultural phenomena that some people may only know of because of a bad SNL joke or an overdone Twitter trend, but may never interact with otherwise.

It sucks that such a sour stench following such a good album, but Brat should be remembered for its ability to soundtrack a good Mario Kart session while carrying a DJ set all by itself. It should be remembered for the stream of concious of a chorus on “Apple” and just getting the 2000s so right. It should be remembered for its unabashed love for cocaine. It should be remembered for its heavy bass, sticky hooks and autotuned shrieking.

This is genuinely one of the best pop albums I’ve heard in years. The remix album is pretty great too.

Favorite tracks: 360, Club classics, Talk talk, Von dutch, B2b, 365