Charli XCX Is Too Brat to Fail

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“I’m always like, More, more, more, more, more, more. Doing it overload,” says Charli XCX. “But this week has been … a lot.”

It’s a Wednesday morning in late July, less than 72 hours after she offhandedly tweeted “kamala IS brat,” accidentally redefining an entire presidential campaign, and Charli has invited me to a Le Labo–scented spa in West Hollywood to decompress. Her assistant booked us a private room for an hour under “Charlotte,” the 32-year-old British artist’s real name, which pretty much no one remembers anymore. She’s dealing with a performance-related neck injury — “It flares up a lot when I’m stressed” — and things have been a bit stressful lately. Charli arrived in her black Porsche 911, wearing knee-high leather boots and big bitchy Khaite sunglasses; she was giving Balenciaga walk of shame, though she insists she didn’t go out last night.

“This is a little … intimate, yeah?” she says before stripping down to an itty-bitty cheetah-print bikini and stepping into a sauna so awkwardly small I kind of can’t believe it’s designed for two people, let alone two strangers. She’s barefaced, already sweating, her usual mountain of curly black hair extensions gone. It’s 158 degrees. “You’re going to get me in a really vulnerable position. You can ask me something crazy,” she says. It’s a teasingly seductive invitation, but Charli is not about to expose herself any further.

Although she still refers to herself as an “underdog pop girl,” her album Brat has gone so mainstream this summer that this veteran club rat seems anxious about how to both keep it going and stop it from crossing over into cringe in the process. “Sometimes you’re the people’s princess,” she tells me. “And sometimes you’re the villain.” Ubiquity will run you hard.

Brat is her sixth studio album, and its 18 party-girl anthems have dominated the discourse since it dropped in June. It has spawned countless memes, TikTok dances, and think pieces, and its lyrics have coined a flurry of catchphrases: “I’m so Julia,” “bumpin’ that,” “Let’s work it out on the remix.” If last year was colored Barbie pink, this one is the deliberately ugly shade of slime green (specifically Pantone 3507-C) she chose for the album cover. The music has been almost secondary to the “brat aesthetic.” It’s a vibe. It’s a pose. It’s a lifestyle brand. It’s a lot. It’s made her more famous than she ever expected.

Anything she does (posting a selfie, leaving her house in an outfit, ranking her favorite snacks in an interview) gets tweeted by Pop Crave and shared and shared and shared: Everyone from Stephen Colbert and Brooke Shields to some grandmas on TikTok is posting dances to her song “Apple.”

“Random artists are calling,” wanting to collaborate, she tells me. “I can’t say who, but people I greatly respect. It’s like being the new kid in school who people are fascinated by.”

Ever since she released Brat’s first single, “Von dutch,” in February — a week later, she DJ’d a Boiler Room set, which a record-setting 25,000 people RSVP’d to — Charli has been putting out new Brat content: first, a green mural in Brooklyn (essentially an activation), where her fans — Charli’s Angels, they call themselves, and they’re historically disproportionately party-loving gays — could take selfies; a surprise show on top of an SUV in front of the mural; and something called bratgenerator.com, where the Angels (and social-media managers trying to stay relevant) could create their own memes in the style of the album’s out-of-focus font. Of course, there’s also merch, like a $60 Brat-green towel (it reads TOWEL). Ever since the album came out, she has been releasing remixes of its songs (including with Robyn, Yung Lean, and Addison Rae). Her rerelease of “Guess” — “You wanna guess the color of my underwear” — with Billie Eilish beat out Taylor Swift and Ice Spice’s “Karma” for the most-streamed remix debut by a female artist on Spotify. “I’m just so honored to have been a part of Brat Summer,” Eilish tells me, calling Charli the “coolest bitch I know.” (On her verse, Eilish sang, “Charli likes boys, but she knows I’d hit it.”)

So what is brat? And how do you stay bratty? Charli herself sums up the philosophy in the sauna as “Who gives a fuck?” Then we get into specifics. With this album, she has reconceptualized the word itself, and now the whole world, really, can be divided into things that are brat and things that are not. It is all highly subjective. On her personal brat list: French manicures, Aperol spritzes, and Lou Reed. “Self-care,” like the spa we’re in — “Not very brat.” (As The Guardian put it ever so dryly in mid-July, “Is the long era of clean living finally over? … Brat highlights how many young women currently aspire to live — dirty, hedonistic, happy and bra-less.”)

“Lying is so fun, so brat,” Charli continues. “Who made this rule that you have to be truthful and honest in the press as an artist? The press is just a tool,” she says, giving me a puckish glare and casting doubt on pretty much everything she has already told me. Every time I suspect she’s tired of our conversation, she suggests we take a cold plunge and she queenishly eggs me on: “Do it. You got this. Wooooo! Wooo-hoooo! You’re killing it. Yasssss!”

Her tweet about Kamala Harris, however, was arguably not really brat. It probably led to Barack Obama, in August, including her song “365,” about being a “365 party girl” and “bumpin’ that” (to be clear, cocaine — bratty Barry!), on his annual summer playlist.

This fall, she’ll try to keep the Brat dominance going, heading out on the Sweat tour with Troye Sivan. She’s hoping it can still feel like a rave, the DIY nightclub scene where she got her start as a teenager growing up in Essex, outside London. (“It’s going to be 100 times more fun than anyone can possibly imagine,” Sivan tells me in a voice-note.)

When we decide to shower off and get dressed, we both realize we forgot to bring underwear. “We’re both being little sluts,” she quips. That’s brat.

A few days later, Charli meets me for lunch at All Time, a trendy brunch spot in Los Feliz. She shows up — again in her Porsche — wearing blue jeans, kitten heels, and a sheer sweater with a black bra peeking through. She has, in her Brat era, undergone something of a glow-up — her ravewear traded in for something more quietly sexy. She’s always wearing buggy sunglasses, even at the club. As with everything Brat — she calls the album rollout “the campaign” — there’s a plan behind it. She’s no longer wearing “pop-star clothes,” she explains. Her stylist, Chris Horan, tells me they started preparing a mood board for her looks over a year ago: “It’s like working with an actor on a role.”

When we walk into the café, someone calls out, “Girllllllllll!” It’s Lorde, or “Ella,” as Charli calls her, who just so happens to be eating lunch here at the same time. “What’s up?” Charli responds. They hug, but we don’t linger.

Part of why Brat has been so successful is she gave her fans something to gossip about. On the lyrics, she name-drops her friends and subtweets her frenemies. On her song “Girl, so confusing,” Charli spins out over another singer she has been hanging with (“Sometimes I think you might hate me / Sometimes I think I might hate you”). When the track dropped, people started debating whom she was talking about, many of them guessing, correctly, that it was Lorde (in a clip that circulates often among her fans, Charli once played along when a journalist mistook her for Lorde, saying “ ‘Royals’ came from, you know, just me looking at, like, how I’m from New Zealand”). A few weeks later, Charli rewarded the speculation by releasing a remix with the actual Lorde. As the original song promised, “One day we might make some music / The internet would go crazy.” And it did.

But seeing Lorde IRL seemed a bit too … real. Out of her control. Not exactly according to today’s plan.

How was it to see Ella? I ask her when we sit down.

“What? Sorry? Me and Ella?” she says, swatting at a bug hovering around us. “It’s good vibes. It’s good vibes.” Earlier, after our visit to the spa, she’d told me, “Honestly this whole thing has brought us closer. I know that’s so fucking cheesy. But it has.”

She redirects the conversation to her friendship with Sivan, whom she describes as a “fucking beautiful angel.” Her mind is somewhere else: “Oyyyyy … ummmm … ugh. Yeah, sorry. I’m a little discombobulated this morning.” She spent last night in the studio working with Bon Iver and Danielle Haim and tells me she’s feeling dehydrated. She takes a napkin off the table and puts it up her shirt to wipe the sweat off her breasts. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Don’t touch that.”

“I’m not assuming I’ll win a Grammy. I need that to be in print,” she says after our food arrives and talk turns to what she would do onstage if she did (she wouldn’t say). “Do you think I will win a Grammy?” Charli asks. I tell her I don’t pretend to know how those sorts of things work. She shovels a spoonful of a rice bowl into her mouth and reframes it: “Do you think I should be nominated for a Grammy?”

The last and only time Charli was nominated was a decade ago, in 2014, for singing the four-line chorus on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.” Charli had signed a record deal at 15, and it was one of three early splashy moments. In 2012, she had made another guest appearance singing on Icona Pop’s hit single “I Love It” (which she wrote); two years later, she released her first solo song to make the charts, “Boom Clap,” which was memorably featured in the teenage cancer drama The Fault in Our Stars. “I don’t remember loads about that time,” she says. “I didn’t even have a fucking stylist.”

In the years after, she turned to making more experimental, brash music with the hyperpop producer SOPHIE and PC Music’s A. G. Cook. But she never found the same level of chart success. She became niche famous with a loyal fan base of queers. (“It’s always the sexually empowered, unapologetic feminine energy that, no matter what, is delicious to the gays,” her friend Benito Skinner, an actor and a comedian, tells me.) “There was this more intense fan base forming,” Charli says. “They weren’t just into the music; they were into me.” Outside her own work, she wrote songs for other artists, including Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello (“Señorita”) and Selena Gomez (“Same Old Love”). She has also written for Britney Spears, though the songs were never released. Her own albums were always filled with features by other artists on the rise, including Tove Lo, Caroline Polachek, Kim Petras, Lizzo, and Sivan.

Ironically, 2022’s Crash, Charli’s previous album, was supposed to be the “sellout” (her term). It was mostly radio-friendly songs with catchy hooks — almost all of them about pining after or rebuking a boy. She has called Crash her “main pop girlie” moment. When she talks about it, she does so hesitantly, as if it’s painful, though it had been her most successful album. “Do I want to be singing ‘Good Ones’ forever?” (The lyrics include “I always let the good ones go-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh.”) “Personally, no,” she says. “Those songs don’t get me off as much.” Last year, shortly after she put out the single “Speed Drive,” which was featured on the Barbie soundtrack, the New York Times identified her as a member of pop music’s “middle class,” i.e., artists who’ve been around a while but can’t ever seem to break through in a big way. Still, the paper concluded, “She can be a big-time pop star, if she so chooses.” When Crash didn’t receive a Grammy, Charli took to Instagram, whining, “Me not being nominated for a grammy for crash is like mia goth not being nominated for an oscar for pearl and only further proves that people don’t wanna see hot evil girls thrive.” During the rollout for that album, she got papped on the street wearing a baby tee that read THEY DON’T BUILD STATUES OF CRITICS.

Crash was the end of a five-album deal, and afterward she considered leaving her label but ended up staying. She describes her relationship with Atlantic as “tricky. “I’ve always been … interpreted as difficult,” she says. “I have a high standard, and I don’t think they’re right always. And I’m not willing to do something just because they think it’s right. They don’t know what’s best for me and my career, you know? I don’t suffer bullshitters, you know? There are a lot of bullshitters in the music industry. There really, really are.”

Some of the ideas for “the campaign” came from a 20-page document she shared with executives at Atlantic last year. “I was like, ‘I’m going to make a record that you guys think has no commercial hits on it. Or big songs. Or radio songs. Or streaming songs or whatever,’” she recalls. “‘But you need to realize that that doesn’t fucking matter. We don’t live in that world anymore, and I’m not that artist.’” She doesn’t care, she tells me several times, about what she considers the old rules of pop stardom: streaming (except her Spotify numbers are pretty solid), magazine profiles (like this one), talk-show appearances (she was on Seth Meyers with Sivan in April), or awards. But she “wouldn’t mind” a Grammy, she admits.

With Brat, Charli gives the impression she feels vindicated by doing things her way. “I’ve never seen my music as particularly niche,” she tells me. “There’s plenty of room for the avant-garde on a commercial level in pop music.” The album did, however, tap into some areas of very online niche interest: It smells like Dimes Square. The music videos — including the one for “360,” which contains a who’s who of “It”-girl cameos by Julia Fox, Hari Nef, Emma Chamberlain, Alex Consani, and Chloë Sevigny — could reasonably be described as “indie-sleazy.” Downtown New York’s favorite post-pandemic DJ, the Dare, produced “Guess,” and the two have since become close friends, constantly appearing in each other’s Instagram Stories. (Recently, they went to see Challengers together, then stayed out until 5 a.m. “He’s so -prolific,” Charli says. “He’s really, really special.”) “Mean girls” is a delightful send-up of a certain cultural archetype these days: the Lana Del Rey–loving, post-woke girl. Dasha Nekrasova, the button-pushing Red Scare podcaster, claims it is about her. I ask Charli if that’s true. “You’re so on one today,” she says. Did she ask her to be in the “360” video? “Ummmmm … I didn’t ask her. But ugh, fuck.” She’s said too much.

Whether Brat is particularly edgy musically is arguable, but it’s definitely not aloof or abstract. It’s deliberately relatable. In addition to songs you want to dance to, there are tracks about millennial Everygirl concerns: mommy issues (“The apple don’t fall far from the tree”), impostor syndrome (“Wondering ’bout whether I think I deserve commercial success”), and whether or not to have a baby (“ ’Cause maybe one day I might / If I don’t run out of time”). It is the first album for which she wrote the lyrics first, and though she is admittedly no lyricist in the vein of Del Rey, the songs are pleasantly catchy. “I think people want something real,” she tells me. Her success this summer has coincided with that of some younger, fresher faces in pop, namely Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, who are also charting big (often, despite Charli’s seeming online omnipresence, above her).

She insists the “ethos of the campaign” is all about “last minuteness.” As she tells it, the Lorde remix, no matter how contrived it may seem, was done on the fly, the result of their hashing it out over text after the song came out. “There’s this element of ‘You had to be there,’” she says. “If you don’t fuck on the first date, they’re not going to want to fuck you, you know what I mean?” Her goal, she says, is “cultivating desire, essentially.”

“This is Brat Summer. But this is the summer Charli XCX was going to have regardless, and she found a way to share that with us,” says YouTuber Chamberlain. “It’s something a lot of 20-somethings can relate to. This is me on the weekends. It’s fun to be like, Oh my fucking God, I drank too much and I accidentally threw up in the street, but it’s so brat. Charli says it’s okay to make mistakes, so we make mistakes.”

Brat is an album about being a sloppy club rat with feelings, and Charli insists she has been doing her reputation justice this summer. “I’m partying all the time,” she says flatly, as if that should be obvious. “Everyone is always like, ‘Charli, now maybe is the time to leave it alone?’ I’m like, ‘Why?’ I’m messy. I’m messy. I’m also really not the girl who leaves at a chic hour.” (Sivan has said she throws “iconic” house parties. I asked Skinner what makes them so great: “Aperol spritzes and loud music.”)

“Brat Summer is all about embracing your bold, unapologetic self, and Charli perfectly captures that spirit,” Kim Kardashian tells me via her rep after Charli stripped down for a Skims campaign in August.

“She’s a pop star who’s larger than life but also vulnerable and kind of sad and feels bad about herself,” says her friend Emily Ratajkowski.

At one point while we’re together, an eager gay approaches Charli. “This is the weirdest year of your life, right?” he says. “America — they didn’t lap up ‘Boom Clap’ until now.”

Charli obliges his request for a selfie. “Joke’s on them, right?” she says.

It’s probably impossible to build a successful pop career these days without borrowing from the Taylor Swift tool kit. The Easter eggs, the signature color, the rabid fans. And both artists are experts at revealing themselves by revealing very little. What is brat, after all, but an era? Charli has spent enough time with Swift to have learned something from her game.

She went on the road with Swift back in 2018 for the Reputation stadium tour, sometimes joining her before the crowds to frolic around to “Shake It Off.” The following year, she told Pitchfork, “As an artist, it kind of felt like I was getting up onstage and waving to 5-year-olds.” (She later put out an apology to the Swifties.)

Now, for Brat, she has written a song seemingly about Swift, though she has not copped to it. On “Sympathy is a knife,” Charli sings about the insecurity she feels in the presence of another artist: “I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” In the second verse, she goes on to say, “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show / Fingers crossed behind my back / I hope they break up quick.”

After the album came out, internet sleuths quickly decided that since Swift was dating the 1975’s front man, Matty Healy, while Charli was on tour with her fiancé, the 1975’s George Daniel, last year, the song must be about Swift. Some more conveniently timed tea: In June, Healy announced he and the model Gabbriette, Charli’s close friend, were engaged. “I’ve always quietly thought they’d be a good couple,” Charli tells me. Some more supposed evidence of a rift: When Swift retweeted a positive review of her album The Tortured Poets Department in April, Charli quote-tweeted it with the comment “everyone’s hype for the sweat tour!” (For her part, Swift told New York, “I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011. Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. She just takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, and she’s been doing it consistently for over a decade. I love to see hard work like that pay off.”)

In May, seemingly predicting how “Sympathy is a knife” would be perceived, Charli put out a “brat psa” on TikTok warning fans that there are no “diss tracks” on the album. She has often framed her lyrical references as a rebellion against the supposed rules of modern feminism. “It’s so complicated,” she explains in that PSA, being “a female artist, where you are pitted against your peers but also expected to be best friends with every single person constantly. If you’re not, you’re deemed a bad feminist.”

Eventually, the two jousted with each other on the charts. In June, Brat was poised to take the No. 1 spot in the U.K., then Swift dropped a surprise rerelease of Tortured Poets, which nabbed the position instead. Shortly after, at a DJ set she did in São Paulo, Charli’s Angels began chanting “Taylor is dead!” in Portuguese, prompting Charli to post an Instagram Story: “Can the people who do this please stop. Online or at my shows. It is the opposite of what I want and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community. I will not tolerate it.”

Neither will she tolerate any questions about the matter. “People are gonna think what they want to think,” she tells me. “That song is about me and my feelings and my anxiety and the way my brain creates narratives and stories in my head when I feel insecure and how I don’t want to be in those situations physically when I feel self-doubt.” Being on tour with the 1975 could be disorienting in general: “Sometimes I’d look onstage and be like, Oh my God … I’m never going to play these rooms, ever. That made me feel jealous,” she says. “I told Matty that. And George. They were both like, ‘Shut up. What are you talking about?’”

I ask if she had ever considered leaving out the line about being backstage together since it makes the allusion seem so obvious: “No.” We sit in silence. “You do the silence game. But I know that well — where you go silent and want me to talk more. But I don’t care about it being awkward,” she says. “We’ll sit in silence.”

Charli offers to drive me to our cover shoot, by David LaChapelle. It’s something of an epic production, which the photographer says is a riff on her pop stardom: “It’s a B-movie take on the idea of a tabloid frenzy. She’s sort of trapped by fame, and all the tabloid photographers are chasing her. An animal trapped in the woods would bite off its own limb — she bites off her hand. Then she’s brought to the hospital and probably given some sort of painkiller. She’s hallucinating. Instead of a real Hollywood tragedy, it’s more of a fantasized one. She’s stuck in a dreamscape.”

Does Charli ever call the paparazzi on herself? “Everyone has paparazzi contacts,” she tells me in a tone that suggests duh. “I call the paparazzi,” she says before catching herself. “I mean, I don’t fucking call them.” Someone does that for her: “I asked Julia once, ‘So, like, what’s the plug? Do you have a guy?’”

She seems to be losing patience with me by now. “Can you say I’m not texting and driving?” she tells me while driving over. (She wasn’t.) She says she’d rather not talk, just listen to some music. Specifically, her music. “Sorry, do you mind? I like listening to stuff.”

Charli says she wants to play me an unfinished remix of “Sympathy is a knife.” “I wrote this three or four weeks ago, about this idea of, like, you have to fall — if you’re deemed to be even in the slightest way on top, you have to fall,” she says. “I’m not a fucking idiot. I know how shit works.”

There’s a new verse in this version that goes, “It’s a knife when you’re finally on top … / They want to see you fall.”

With the Kamala tweet, Charli, perhaps for the first time this summer, made a brand misstep. When she fired it off, she was hanging out in her pool at home in L.A. and waiting for Daniel to finish making lunch. She meant it more as “something positive and lighthearted” than a political endorsement, but then Harris’s campaign, clearly aware of what the kids are talking about right now, began posting “welcome to kamala hq” to their new social-media accounts in the style of the album cover. Thus began, in the middle of one of the most disorienting news cycles in recent memory, another in the middle of it, in which political pundits and everyone’s mother were trying to figure out what exactly brat is and what it has to do with Harris (“can you explain to me what brat kamala means,” my friend’s mom texted her. “Ok i goggled [sic] it but next question is who is Charli CCX [sic]”). On a CNN panel trying to explain the apparent Zeitgeist, Jake Tapper announced, sounding hopelessly boomerish, “I will aspire to be brat.” The mainstream media breathlessly interpreted the viral moment as proof that the youth might turn out at the polls. The right wing resorted to hysterics. “We don’t need a brat in this moment,” said a panelist on Fox News. “The border is open. Inflation’s through the roof. The price of gas has doubled. Brats did this.” There’s a good reason the Harris campaign co-opted Brat green but chose Beyoncé’s “Freedom” for the vice-president’s walk-on song. Nonetheless, at the DNC, people sold DEMO(B)RAT hats.

“To be on the right side of democracy, the right side of women’s rights, is hugely important to me,” Charli tells me when I ask about her becoming a cable-news talking point. She makes her statement one careful word at a time. “I’m happy to help to prevent democracy from failing forever.” It is an uncharacteristically earnest response. “I obviously knew what I was doing,” she continues, rolling her eyes, presumably at herself. But she did not expect her tweet to be viewed 55 million times. “Did I think me talking about being a messy bitch and, like, partying and needing a Bic lighter and a pack of Marlboro Lights would end up on CNN? No.” She is not, nor has she ever been, nor does she want to be “a political artist,” she says. “I’m not Bob Dylan, and I’ve never pretended to be.” Besides, she’s British; she can’t even vote in the U.S. “My music is not political,” she tells me. “Everything I do in my life feeds back into my art. Everything I say, wear, think, enjoy — it all funnels back into my art. Politics doesn’t feed my art.”

Perhaps, then, the only thing Harris and Charli actually share is that they’re making people feel slightly less miserable this year. The other thing they might share: a hunch that this good feeling can’t last forever, can it?

In the wake of the Kamala tweet, Pitchfork ran a story declaring the end of Brat Summer — asking, “Could it survive being co-opted by brand executives?” — and Deutsche Bank uploaded a job listing as a brat meme: “We’re looking for a brat in finance.” The MTA posted in brat lingo. So did the Brooklyn Museum and Caroline Calloway and Hydro Flask. Charli posted through it, sharing a screenshot of the Pitchfork obituary on Instagram with the caption “oh? see u next week :)”

Her remix to “Guess” with Eilish hit No. 1 in the U.K. She launched the brand partnership with Skims as well as one with Laneige. She threw a celeb-packed 32nd-birthday party — and sang “Girl, so confusing” with Lorde — with photos by the Cobrasnake that went viral (even if it all seemed more staged than real; Addison Rae told me it was “one of the best nights of my life in L.A.”). Soon, Charli says, there may be a “full-length other project,” though she won’t call it a remix album. “But it’s definitely in the bratosphere, so to speak.” She is juicing this moment for all it’s worth. She wants to branch out into acting, she says, and will make a “pretty unrecognizable” appearance in the remake of the ’70s slasher flick Faces of Death, per the director, which is planned to be released next year. In August, she reportedly went to Poland to work on a movie with Jeremy O. Harris. She recently shared a new “brat autumn” meme on Instagram. The caption: “are we ready for this.”

Are we? Can you be both brat and hyperpopular? “I’m not gonna lie: I really like ‘Apple,’ but then once everybody else liked it, I was like, I don’t like it anymore,” Ratajkowski tells me. Fox says she and Charli get along because they represent a new kind of celebrity, one who — notwithstanding the constant churn of attention-getting gags they put out — doesn’t care about being one. “It’s not even that cool to be famous,” Fox tells me without irony.

But brat is now so big that it just keeps getting bigger. As Imogene Strauss, Charli’s creative director, would later tell me, “We couldn’t control it anymore. We lost our baby, in a weird way.”

“I’m very well aware that you can’t be omnipresent forever,” Charli tells me in her car. “I’ve known for a minute that at some point, someone will say this is over. I actually think the press and outlets don’t get to decide when it’s over. The kids get to decide when it’s over.” It’s all larger than her now: “This is a ‘sit back and watch it burn’ situation for me.”