The summer of 2024 was puce-green and synth-heavy – the playground of Charli XCX, the pop star borne out of a young girl from Essex. Her hit album Brat was not zeitgeist riding, but genre-defining. It escaped the confines of Spotify and took over the culture. When Charli declared on X “Kamala IS brat”, the record was suddenly no longer a 15-track musing on what it means to be a “365 party girl”, but a political tool in the year’s highest stake election. When Lorde, the poet laureate of adolescent hysterics, hopped on a remix of “Girl, So Confusing”, the Brat train only found more momentum. But there is no such thing as perpetual motion.
In defiance of that principle, today Charli XCX released a new version of the album: Brat And It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat. It’s as contrived as it sounds – each song is remixed and features another artist, from A-Listers such as Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish, to indie and hyperpop darlings such as Caroline Polachek and Japanese House. Some tracks push the concept of a “remix” to extremes: the new version of “B2b” sounds like an entirely new song. Others seem slapdash and thin reinterpretations: “Apple”, one of the original album’s viral hits, has changed only on the shallow surface.
There are triumphant moments. Eilish teases “Charli likes boys but she knows I’d hit it” on the sleazy “Guess”. Bon Iver makes Bon Iver noises (oooOOOooAAAaaa) on “I Think About It All The Time”, taking a tender track into the stratosphere. The 1975 – not always a welcome addition – shine on “I Might Say Something Stupid”. But the remix can destroy its source material too: “So I”, in its original incarnation, is a tribute to Charli’s late friend and mentor SOPHIE. The new version loses the Marie Kondo-ed minimalism and replaces it with tabloid-y, diaristic lyrics.
This isn’t a bad album. In fact, it’s a mostly great palimpsest. “Brat summer” may have been an exhilarating moment, but it has passed. Now Charli has attempted to herald “Brat autumn” (launched in the incongruously unbratty Storm King sculpture park in upstate New York). The internet cycles through fads faster than ever now. And Brat summer is already on its way to the cringe oubliette, occupied by the early memes of the internet: the Lolcat, XD Rawr, the Totes Amazeballs of it all. This is fine: trends come and go, and there is no reason not to adopt and embrace them with full enthusiasm at their acme. But there is a reason the Lolcat died.
This year Taylor Swift has faced criticism for releasing several iterations of The Tortured Poets Department – an already overexposed and lengthy album – in a bid to manipulate the charts and hold on to her streaming supremacy. It would be hypocritical to condemn Taylor but not Charli. Brat the remix is a bid for virality that may even work for a brief moment, but it will ultimately see the entire project age worse than it should have. For someone who read the temperature so well with Brat 1.0, Charli has called the shots wrong this time. Brat summer should be preserved in aspic, exiting the culture with the same verve and confidence it arrived with. Instead, this is a watery goodbye.
[See also: The end of Generation Rock]
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