Henry Redcliffe
"We're fine art bitches now!"
Such is how Charli XCX welcomed a throng of reporters, influencers, and loyal fans to Storm King Art Center on Thursday, a sprawling landscape in upstate New York that's dotted with ambitious, large-scale art installations. Newly chief among them: A lime green square with a wordy album title, printed backward.
We were there to celebrate "Brat and It's Completely Different But Also Still Brat," a remixed version of, you guessed it, "Brat," Charli's sixth studio album and bonafide phenomenon.
Nestled among the rolling hills and fall foliage, Charli's team had commissioned a 30-foot by 30-foot replica of a halfway-open gatefold cover. When she arrived around 4:30 p.m., Charli stood in the folded crease atop a DJ booth, looking strangely at home with her fur accents and signature black sunnies.
"Just wanted to get you in this really convenient location to play you some songs from the album," Charli announced, poking fun at the multi-hour trip from the city to Hudson Valley.
Indeed, for this event, inconvenience was the whole point.
Henry Redcliffe
Since the June arrival of "Brat," the album has maintained an impressive grip on the public's imagination, a marketing coup so successful and widespread that it earned its own era-defining shorthand: "Brat summer." Charli's bold, idiosyncratic music has enchanted even the stingiest critics, including self-described music nerds, Pitchfork reviewers, and presidential candidates. She has posed for buzzy magazine covers and created viral moments with the flick of her finger.
Most recently, Charli has been traversing the country with Troye Sivan for their Sweat Tour, commanding arena-sized crowds with a mix of commercial hits ("I Love It," Charli's 2012 duet with Icona Pop; "Speed Drive," her contribution to last year's "Barbie" soundtrack) and club classics from her latest album ("Apple," which spawned a TikTok trend; "365," which landed on Barack Obama's yearly playlist). By the time the tour ends, she'll hit all the standard marks for a pop star at her peak, from Madison Square Garden to back-to-back nights in Los Angeles.
By contrast, the latest stop on Charli's quest for world domination was unpredictable, almost disruptive.
The picturesque Storm King pop-up was expressly designed to get Charli's fans out of their element, to challenge our perception of her brand, and, in doing so, to extend her cultural dominance.
The "Brat summer" campaign was clever and undeniably successful — not to mention lucrative. According to Billboard, the groundswell of mainstream acclaim has netted Charli nearly $10 million so far this year, a rough estimate that accounts for ticket sales, songwriter royalties, and various corporate deals. (The listening party featured a Vitamin Water activation, plus a livestream on Twitch, which drew over 300,000 unique viewers. "She has got the attention of anybody that she wants right now," Jenna Adler, Charli's agent at CAA, told Billboard.)
However, it's risky to bind a project so tightly to a specific time of year. Seasons are transient by definition, and summer feels particularly fleeting.
Following that logic, once the temperature drops and humidity recedes, the "Brat" listening window also closes, impeding Charli's long-term earning potential. Charli herself has acknowledged this, posting "goodbye forever brat summer" on X (formerly Twitter) on Labor Day.
Henry Redcliffe
That's where "Brat autumn" comes in.
Charli could've easily thrown her listening party for "Brat and It's Completely Different But Also Still Brat" at a Manhattan club or Brooklyn warehouse. Her music is already associated with sweaty raves, flashing strobes, and hedonistic nights. It's a strong brand, yes, but a limiting one.
So instead, she took her fans upstate and repositioned her now-iconic album artwork among blue skies, crimson leaves, and steel structures by Mark di Suvero, Alexander Calder, and Alicja Kwade — literally staking her place among artists who create massive, resolute, weather-defying monuments.
It turns out the cover's eye-catching shade of green, which has become essential to the recognizable "Brat" brand, is surprisingly adaptable. Fine art purists may balk at its presumptuous placement within the world-class sculpture collection, but speaking as a layman, the juxtaposition was visually stunning. Who doesn't love a pop of color?
Charli's physical approach to the remix album's rollout is reflected in the music itself. As the title suggests, very few of the new songs resemble the original versions, recycling themes and phrases while excising old beats, changing tempos, swapping producers, and recruiting new faces to join Charli's orbit. It's familiar enough to appease the album's passionate listeners, yet distinct enough to spark a second wave of glowing reviews and themed dance parties; ultimately, it proves just how elastic and versatile the "Brat" universe can be.
The highly anticipated "Sympathy is a Knife" remix, for example, has been completely rewritten and stripped of its show-stopping chorus, making space for Charli to duet with Ariana Grande about — what else? — enduring, evolving, and defying expectations. "It's a knife when somebody says they like the old me and not the new me," both women sing. "And I'm like, 'Who the fuck is she?'"
At the listening party, Charli made this motif even more explicit.
"I feel like it's really cool to show the infinite possibilities of dance music and music in general," she told us. "It can all be completely deconstructed and then put back together again. Why not? Why just be like, 'It's the album and it's done?'"
One thing's for sure: Charli is not done, and neither is the "Brat" era. She didn't play the entire remix album at Storm King, opting instead to tease us with select tracks — keeping us on our toes, always wanting more.
When it came time to leave, Charli thanked us for coming and offered a fitting final remark: "Happy brat autumn! Don't you forget it."
