Band: Charli XCX
Album:brat
Best song:“Sympathy is a Knife” is the best song of 2024.
Worst song:I could do without “Mean Girls,” but the record isn’t exactly made for me.
It’s been almost a full two years since I wrote about SZA’s SOS in this space. Much has changed in that time; I got laid off and got a new job, for example. Two years is both a long time and nothing.
As with everything included with this site, I am definitely not the person to write about this particular album; I’m not into the music nor the scene to which the record adheres and speaks. I’m certainly too old to even exist physically near another Charli fan and, while I enjoyed her work before brat, I was hardly a superfan. So, I come to this as a sort of outsider appreciating a near-flawless piece of art.A lot of artists I enjoy have released records since I last wrote, but the brilliance of brat and its zeitgeist-y nature moved me to write (my being a lame straight white guy in middle age… that definitely kills anything resembling zeitgeist about it, though Charli’s SNL appearance didn’t help). In short, brat is that good that even a doofy man like me can appreciate it in its wholeness.
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I’m old and sad. I don’t do illicit drugs (especially not nose drugs), I just drink alcohol. I’m not a club person, nor have I ever been one. I’m a straight man from a suburb. How the hell did brat hit me in the way that it did?
“brat summer” was, for sure, a moment in time. My relationship with Charli XCX goes deeper than that, albeit in a thinner way. I loved Sucker and, especially, Crash, but I found myself feeling the same way I’ve felt with (alleged brat song subject) Taylor Swift. This isn’t made for me, so I can keep it at arms length. This record is no different, just better.
I find myself in these situations in the real world sometimes, big to small. At a work event recently, I was talking with colleagues young enough to be my children (if I had kids in HS) about “Good Luck, Babe!” being one of the best songs of recent vintage and had to navigate being the old man at the club. The song is great, my analysis sounded like a dollar store Robert Christgau bit and I don’t need to be part of this. My colleagues humored me, but come on.
And, in fact, that’s probably why brat is so powerful. “Club classics” and “365” are the record’s outliers – the latter is a perfect club banger with the best sonic move (the beat drop at 1:24 is life-changing) of the year – in that it’s they are apex of Charli’s previous work (songs about nose drugs and partying). But, the other great songs on the record – most of them! – dive into vulnerability that hits better than anything. Her introspection makes brat a classic for even an elder millennial like myself.
Reckoning with one’s family is hard, but “Apple” makes it relatable and tender. The imagery of a solo drive is one that we can all feel and the conversations around family and the aging process is one which I know I am engaging each day (quick story: I got new eyeglass frames last year that look like photos of my dad when he was my age. I saw my reflection in a friend’s sunglasses and thought I saw my dad. The apple, in fact, visually does not fall far from the tree, indeed.). “Mean girls” isn’t – to keep banging this particular drum – made for me, but the communal sentiment of that community is one that’s hard not to enjoy, even if the song falls short sonically. As we navigate our years, calling back to a simpler time while listening to records and less self-aware; “Rewind” not only moves, but will bring a rose-colored tear to even the most grizzled older millennial.
But, more than anything, it directly references Charli’s own tenderness. The boom-clap (sorry, I had to) bravado of “Von dutch” is a perfect flip side to the perfect “Sympathy is a knife,” the record’s highlight and the best song of 2024.
Vacillating between the hyper pop bragging, woe-is-me whining and real vulnerability, the song takes the best elements of the rest of the record’s highlights – the “shape of my face” notes from “Rewind,” the hesitance of “I might say something stupid,” etc. – and wraps it in the hardest beats of the record. If there’s something close to a metal groove on the record, it’s the song that outlines how public perception, pop star comparison shopping and ego clashes with her private doubts. The unnamed ha) “girl” who fuels Charli’s insecurities doesn’t really matter; like Swift’s “Nothing New” from the new version Red, “Sympathy is a knife” is, at its heart, a song about growing up in the music industry and the ways that everyone else pins their shit on you. In Charli’s case, the production on the song compliments her sometimes on-the-edge vocals. In the pantheon of singers’ timbre matching songs pitch perfectly, “Sympathy is a knife” is up there with “War Pigs,” “Silver Springs” and “Dig Me Out.”
(The remix is also great! Ariana Grande adds a fluttery femme layer to the song and the new production adds melancholy over the original. It’s great.)
The odd comparison I bring to brat is Sinner Get Ready, in that both are records decidedly coming from a specific perspective that is both foreign to me and somewhat universal. Neither of the records was inherently made for me, yet they both hit me directly in the solar plexus.
As mentioned, I’m old. I listen to more pop music made by women than I probably should (Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Phoebe Bridgers and Charli come to mind immediately, but I do consider “Good Luck, Babe!” and “Espresso” to be perfect pop songs up there with “Material Girl.”), to the point that they’re the closest thing I have to a guilty pleasure.
Being old, however, also means that I don’t really have to deal with the sturm und drang around these artists. Chappell Roan’s struggles with fame, whatever Lana Del Rey’s marriage is like, etc… I hear about these things, but I am lucky to be able to say “not my problem.” It’s nice. As such, I heard vague stuff about “brat summer” and the “brat aesthetic” – it was somewhat omnipresent, after all– but I never had to learn much about it. As with so many things in online culture, it is both ironic and slightly sincere; plenty of normies think the vice president is actually cool and enough online doofuses realize that a former state attorney general probably is not on board with a record’s climax song having the lyric “Should we do a little key? Should we have a little line? Wanna go real wild?”
Even so, I’d put money on Kamala Harris ceding that “365” is as good as it gets for what it is. It’s “Lookout Weekend” for the 21st century; messy, frenetic, inclusive and beautiful. Brat summer is forever.