The 50 best albums of 2024: No 1 – Charli xcx: Brat (and Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat) | Charli xcx

In 2022, Charli xcx released Crash, an album that she claimed was a deliberate “sellout”. An artist who had previously seemed hell-bent on singlehandedly dragging pop music into a more interesting, experimental space by sheer force of will – on her acclaimed 2017 mixtape Pop 2, she collaborated with Estonian “post-Soviet” rappers, Brazilian drag queens and the extravagantly foul-mouthed underground artist CupcakKe – had apparently decided not to bother any more. She gamely presented Crash as another experiment in “making a major-label album the way it’s actually done” and knowingly embracing “everything that the life of a pop figurehead has to offer in today’s world – celebrity, obsession and global hits”, but you somehow sensed her heart wasn’t quite in it. Moreover, it didn’t totally work – it was well reviewed and became Charli’s first UK No 1 album, but didn’t exactly produce “global hits”.

What Charli subsequently described as a deadening experience lit a fire under its author: if playing the game was no fun, then why not do exactly as you please? Certainly, Charli xcx’s sixth album turned out to be everything Crash wasn’t, up to and including the defining pop album of the year. Instead of a sleeve featuring the singer in a bikini, as Crash did, Brat came wrapped in a blunt, lowercase rendering of the album’s title against a sickly lime green: intended as a snub to the “misogynistic and boring” assumption that a female artist should automatically appear on her own album cover, it turned out to be a masterstroke of branding far more pervasive than any glossy photo, even influencing the US presidential race. Its sound was brash and aggressive, early 00s London club music – electroclash, acid-y bloghouse, dubstep, maximalist rave synths – shot through a chattering, trebly hyperpop filter: “Club classic but I still pop,” as Von Dutch put it. It oozed self-possession and confidence, Brat seemed to swagger even as Charli confessed to insecurity or inadequacy, a cocktail of emotions that seemed to be at the album’s centre: if everyone feels like this, you might as well own it.

It felt fundamentally honest: instead of pop’s usual broad-brushstroke self-help platitudes, there was something striking about the splurge of complex, vacillating feelings regarding motherhood on I Think About It All the Time, or the mixture of admiration and resentment on Mean Girls. Most importantly, it had a surfeit of fantastic songs: Apple, Everything Is Romantic, Club Classics, So I’s heartbreaking eulogy to her late collaborator Sophie.

Messy, obdurate and in your face, Brat’s tone struck a genuine cultural nerve. Perhaps you could have seen that coming. Over the last couple of years, a nostalgic fascination with “indie sleaze” – grimy, sweaty looking images of early 00s hedonism and the music that soundtracked it – seemed to indicate a longing among gen Z for a rather less straitened, watchful, self-censoring mood than that of recent years. Brat was the right album at the right time, something that other pop stars – ordinarily more commercially successful than Charli xcx – recognised: Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish and Lorde all appeared on the remix album Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat, the latter on a version of Girl, So Confusing, a song about Charli xcx’s fraught relationship with … Lorde. Taylor Swift, meanwhile, was apparently so rattled by Brat’s arrival that she suddenly released six different deluxe editions of her album The Tortured Poets Department in order to keep it from reaching No 1 in the UK.

Whether Brat singlehandedly drags pop music into a more interesting, experimental space remains to be seen. But whether you view it as zeitgeist-capturing or zeitgeist-changing feels slightly beside the point. More important is that it does everything you might conceivably want a pop album to do: it’s sharp and smart, funny and moving; it’s experimental and danceable; it has big tunes and depth; it sounds like now. And it’s the product of a pop artist declining to chase trends, and instead just being themselves. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.