Charli XCX Launches an Exhilarating New Chapter of Pop With the Innovative ‘Brat’: Album Review
variety.comJem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Charli XCX has been one of pop music’s leading innovators for more than a decade, and like so many innovators, she’s long since moved on by the time most of the world reaches the place she just was.
She’d scored several major chart hits by her early twenties — her own “Boom Clap,” Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” — but (characteristically) got bored with it quickly and made a dramatically hard pivot by collaborating with hyper-pop patron saint Sophie on the brittle “Vroom Vroom” EP.
Over the next few years, working with fellow Sophie collaborator A.G. Cook and others, she gradually merged that sound with her pop instincts into a hybrid of glitter and glitch that climaxed with her brilliant 2017 mixtape “Pop 2” and the 2019 album “Charli.” She didn’t invent it, but the pop-with-rough-edges fusion was a sound she’d been evangelizing for years.
True to form, by the time hyper-pop became a thing, she was already charging off in a different direction with 2022’s “Crash,” which had bigger, louder hooks and a synthy ‘80s sound that moved away from the glitch (Cook was present on just a couple of songs), but wasn’t without its sharp edges.
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