Charli xcx: BRAT review – queen of the club reveals her softer side

BRAT may offer some of the nastiest club floor-fillers of Charli xcx’s lauded career, but there’s also vulnerable reflections on loss and the daunting prospect of becoming a mother. The result is a rollercoaster of an album that makes a point of its dramatic shifts in tone.

Charli xcx is an artist most at home in the frenetic, sweaty confines of a busy London nightclub, her music bursting with punchy drum machines and oddball electronic samples that no doubt come into their own when accompanied by strobes and a packed crowd of revelers. She’s gained so much notoriety as a dance music-adjacent singer that her 2022 album, CRASH, had some critics lamenting that she’d finally succumbed to the alluring pull of Top 40 pop (actual guitars! verses and choruses!). In reality, that album’s stellar highlights – zinging 80s throwback Lightning, honeyed funk hit Yuck – hinted at a songwriting knack that Charli would always have up her sleeve, no matter the genre.

Alas, as BRAT emphatically proves, Charli xcx’s ability to produce some our time’s finest nightclub anthems remains alive and well. As if to prove a point, she puts a song called Club classics at track two, a pulsating, shapeshifting electronic track that sounds all the more dynamic after the curiously static and unexciting opener 360. “I wanna be blinded by the lights” and “I’m gonna dance all night,” come the chanted lyrics. They’re the sort of words we’ve heard in endless dance and disco songs ever since the genre’s genesis, but Charli knows there’s hidden depths behind that urge to blind and deafen ourselves on a night out. Why do we not only want to dance, but need it? What are we escaping from?

She spends the rest of the album offering her own, very personal answer to that question. BRAT turns out to be a strikingly intimate listen. She confesses she wants to “go back in time to when I wasn’t insecure,” on Rewind, a track which uses a fuzzy mix to acutely convey Charli’s gnawing anxiety, plus some clever tape rewind samples. “I don’t know if I belong here anymore,” comes the final line of I might say something stupid, a quiet confessional amidst the chaos, in which Charli’s typical heavy autotune becomes a knowingly imperfect mask – a desperate attempt to hide her own frailties. I think about it all the time goes a step further, seeing Charli reflect on her friend becoming a mother and whether “a baby might be mine.” It’s such a vulnerable, thoughtful set of lyrics that the music ends up feeling like an afterthought. Perhaps the same is true for So I, a touching ode to late fellow artist Sophie with a pretty chorus but a long buildup that promises a payoff which never quite arrives.

And yet, there are just as many examples of Charli portraying herself as an unassailable queen of the dancefloor, with no insecurities to unpick. Lead single and BRAT‘s central banger, Von dutch, is an infectious take down of all Charli’s jealous contemporaries. “It’s so obvious I’m your number one,” she boasts as siren-like synths wail and a snare drum – mixed loud and in-your-face – smashes through the mix. Mean girls reads as a modern, lightly tongue-in-cheek feminist anthem, and sports a wild piano breakdown which Charli skillfully works into one of this album’s most irresistible beat drops. The biggest flex of Charli’s producer muscles, however, comes with B2b, an oppressively heavy masterclass in infectious synth loops and expertly crafted hooks.

The result is a two-sided album that switches from intimate confessions to festival-ready anthems, sometimes chaotically – the tender orchestral intro of Everything is romantic sounds odd immediately after the boisterous Von dutch. Only a few songs – Sympathy is a knife, Rewind – attempt to marry Charli’s chagrin to singalong party choruses, and as a result listening to BRAT can feeling about listening to two albums at once, switching from one to the other at random intervals.

On the other hand, BRAT‘s huge emotional range makes for a dance album that unusually probes for some sensitivity behind the hedonism. The latter emotion seems to win out in the end. Closing number 365 is a reprise of the opening track, although this time with a full-throttle dance drop and deafeningly scratchy synth hook. It’s gloriously odd moments of pop excess like these that are ultimately BRAT‘s biggest strengths, but this album also succeeds in showing us the hidden depths lurking amidst all the stage smoke and flashing lights of the club.

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