’s last album was designed to reach as many people as possible. Satisfying the contract she signed with Atlantic as a teenager, 2022’swas a conceptual go-for-broke by a pop star who had made her name as a refusenik, save a few uneasy youthful flirtations with the mainstream. She swapped her avant garde collaborators for blue-chip songwriters, mastered slick choreo and duly interpolated. It worked, becoming her most successful album yet.
But Brat transcends exclusivity because Charli’s unbarred feelings of insecurity, bitchiness and obsession are so fiercely well observed that they make– pop’s most deadening theme – than profound observations on all kinds of relationships, not least how women end up constructing brusque personae to survive the stupid hell of socialisation. Charli’s Partygirl club nights may be famously impossible to get into, but here the only price of entry is having ever worried about whether you fit in.