Charli XCX

Since 2008 · United Kingdom

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Brat (2024)

Brat compresses years of Charli XCX's hyperpop-adjacent experimentation into a tighter, more immediate pop framework, loud, brash production sitting alongside lyrics that are unusually candid about ambition, insecurity, and her own place in pop's pecking order. "360" opens the record on a strutting, self-mythologizing note that sets the tone for much of what follows. "Girl, so confusing" turns an actual, specific interpersonal conflict into a song rather than a vague concept, an unusually direct move for a pop record built otherwise on outsized confidence. Brat became a genuine cultural touchstone in the year of its release, extending the hyperpop aesthetic she'd helped popularize into a much larger pop audience.

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Charli XCX

Brat · 2024

Charli XCX began as a fairly conventional pop artist, scoring big early hits with "I Love It" and "Boom Clap" before pivoting hard toward a stranger, more experimental sound through a run of mixtapes made with SOPHIE and A.G. Cook starting in 2016. Pop 2 (2017) in particular became a touchstone for the emerging hyperpop scene, pairing Charli's pop songwriting instincts with heavily distorted, maximalist PC Music production, a long list of guest features, and deeper cuts like "Track 10" that fans singled out despite its deliberately blank title.

Charli continued moving between mainstream pop albums and more experimental side releases through the years that followed, treating the two modes as complementary rather than contradictory. Brat (2024) folded much of what she'd absorbed from the PC Music and hyperpop scenes into a bigger pop framework, and the album became a genuine cultural moment, its aesthetic and attitude widely discussed well beyond her existing fanbase. Charli has been consistently vocal about her debt to SOPHIE specifically, crediting her directly as a foundational influence on the direction her music took after their early collaborations.