Charli XCX
Unless you live under a rock or have been on a well-deserved internet break, you’ve certainly encountered the effects of Brat. In a literal sense, Brat is the latest album from pop star Charli XCX. But in a much greater cultural sense, Brat is a state of mind. It’s a white tank top and cutoffs paired with a designer bag. It’s cigarettes and cheap alcohol picked up at the nearest gas station on the way to a party in a McMansion. It’s trashy and classy put in a blender. The internet at large dubbed the past few months Brat Summer: a season for it-girls and hustle-culture iconoclasts to declare their dominance.
Brat has a similar “the world is ending so we might as well dance” vibe to early-2010s Kesha. It’s Charli XCX’s most self-aware and vulnerable work to date; sonically, the British pop queen has never been more ready to party, drawing on the glitchy sounds of hyperpop and the decades of electronic music informing the rave scene she was part of as a teen. “360” is an ode to the it-girl — the lyrics name-drop Julia Fox, and the self-effacing, star-studded video features everyone from Gen-Z faves Rachel Sennott and Emma Chamberlain to the inimitable Chloë Sevigny. The confessional banger “Apple” quickly became a viral TikTok sound, with everyone from the cast of Twisters to Amish influencers jumping in on the dance trend. “Club Classics” is all about Charli’s commitment to making the kind of music she wants to listen to, while songs like “Sympathy Is a Knife” and “Girl, So Confusing” are open about how difficult it is to be a young woman.
Charli XCX
In mid-September, Charli teamed with Australian pop phenom Troye Sivan to co-headline a tour, a kind of Brat’s day out dubbed Sweat. The pair are longtime collaborators, with their latest being a duet rework of Brat’s “Talk Talk.” (That is destined for the delightfully titled remix album Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat, due Oct. 11.) If Charli’s music is for the girls, Sivan’s is for the gays — though both really go both ways.
Sivan’s third album, Something to Give Each Other, came out in October 2023 and pushed the onetime YouTuber into the mainstream. After Timothée Chalamet (and boygenius) play you on SNL, there’s no going back. Sivan’s been making solid indie-pop music for a decade, but Something is by far his best work to date, with a sound and visual elements that delve into international club culture and flirtation.
The whole album is strong, but its shining star is the single “One of Your Girls.” It’s incredibly difficult to create a song that makes listeners want to simultaneously cry and dance, and only a few have done it well. Count Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” and The 1975’s “Somebody Else”; “One of Your Girls” is a natural addition to that list, a Swedish-style dance-pop masterpiece (credit to producer Oscar Görres) about loving someone who will never fully love you back. It’s the closest Sivan comes to a ballad on the album, but it packs the punch of three combined. There’s something new to pick out with every listen: a joke in the lyrics that slipped by before, or a woven-in beat that you don’t realize you’re hearing till you discover that it keeps you coming back. The video takes the concept to the next level, with Sivan switching in and out of drag and dancing with Ross Lynch, aka the internet’s boyfriend.
After a few of the worst years in recent memory — and with plenty of uncertainty about the future to go around — everyone needs a reason to dance. Charli XCX and Troye Sivan know this well. Sweat, which also features English DJ Shygirl as your opener, is an antidote to end-of-summertime sadness: an occasion to don a going-out top and immerse yourself in the crowd.
