In 2019, near the end of her Pitchfork Music Festival set in Chicago, Charli XCX screamed, “Make some noise if me, Charli XCX, is one of the top 15 pop stars in the world!” She wasn’t even the evening’s headliner — second on the bill only to Robyn — a medium-fish pop star who might open stadium tours but lacked the clout to book them herself. Onstage, she smirked as if to acknowledge all of this. “Keeping it arrogant, but also fair, you know?”
That cheeky self-inflation, a Charli signature, isn’t necessary now. She is the pop star of the moment. Former presidents put her “bumpin’ that” cocaine bangers on playlists for cool cred; aspiring ones latch onto her endorsement for dear life. After Brat conquered the summer, Charli is moving on to fall. As the weather cooled, fans scoped global-city horizons for slime-green billboards, pieced together her next moves, and played hooky from work for the multi-hour commute to the open-air museum at Storm King where she DJ’d. All this for a remix album, one stacked with talent — though the best new contributions to the album come from Charli herself.
Charli wrote new verses for all of her songs on Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, except for the ones she’d already released (like “girl, so confusing” with Lorde). And although several songs amp up the party, like the blistering “365” remix with Shygirl, the Brat-iest artist out there outside of Charli herself, the bulk of them pull back the curtains on the XCX persona and reveal what fame is like for her now. “It’s a knife when somebody says they like the old me and not the new me / And I’m like, ‘Who the fuck is she,’” Charli sings on “Sympathy Is a Knife,” featuring an underwhelming Ariana Grande, who leaves her extraordinary vocal talents in another room. (Some disappointed Ari fans have started calling the remix “Empathy Is a Fork.”) On “Rewind,” featuring Bladee, she considers that she actually might be a worse person: greedier, and more narcissistic, now that she’s successful. “All this money makes me competitive,” she confesses. “Wanna see my face all up in the press / When I don’t, sometimes I get a little bit depressed.”
The best collaboration on the album, “Everything Is Romantic,” featuring Caroline Polachek, is almost a dialogue between Charli and herself. Polachek is a reassuring presence on the other end of a phone call, there to absorb and crystallize her friend’s spiraling thoughts: “It’s like you’re living the dream, but you’rе not living your life.” (Polachek, predictably magnetic, also contributes serpentine vocal melodies, writerly atmosphere, and the semi-gross but unforgettable lyric “free-bleeding in the autumn rain.”) The original declaration in the title — “everything is romantic” — flips into a question. What if the fairy tale suddenly comes true, but life doesn’t feel so magical?
The Brat remix album is less annoying than other “fame is hard” records because of Charli’s unique vantage point and self-examination. Only now has she reached the superstar status she always wanted, and she is grateful. “I’m fuckin’ tired, but I love it and I’m not complainin’ / Oh, shit, I kinda made it,” she begins “b2b,” featuring Tinashe, another workaholic underdog who’s finally getting proper recognition after a decade in the industry. The problem is not the fans or publicists who dump more on her schedule; it’s how badly she wants more, even at the expense of her mental well-being and relationships. She lays this out on the remix to “I think about it all the time,” still the most heartbreaking song on the record, revealing the calculations stopping her fiancé and her from choosing parenthood. “There’s so much guilt involved when we stop working / ’Cause you’re not supposed to stop when things start working, no.” At the peak of her career, she still feels pressure to keep on climbing: “’Cause my career still feels small in the existential scheme of it all.”
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