With the presidential election racing against the speed of Biden’s cognitive decline, the Supreme Court tearing away civil liberties, and the median cost of everything going crazy, anyone with a pulse wants to ignore the present. Charli XCX’s new hyperpop album, Brat, aids this shift to escapism.
Reminiscent of electropop music following the financial crisis of 2008, like Kesha’s generation-defining debut single “Tik Tok,” this new genre of hyperpop sounds like pure elation but with confrontational lyrics and an angsty tone. Since the late-2010s, hyperpop has held the attention of club culture with musical artists backed by the producer A.G. Cook. Gwen Stefani may or may not have invented hyperpop with “Wind It Up” in 2005, but Cook secured the sound as a genre with SOPHIE’s “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” in 2017.
Since then, Cook and Charli XCX have collaborated and essentially shaped the future of pop. Pushing the genre into the mainstream spotlight, Brat is the culmination of this innovation. Teased with the single “Von Dutch” back in February, Charli’s sound on Brat is fresher than ever. With the same punchiness as Lily Allen and the bubbly melodrama as Lady Gaga’s golden era, Brat is pop like you’ve never heard before.
Charli possesses an in-your-face star power largely missing from the 2020s chart-toppers. So much current music has been stripped back to vocals with a few sounds and many effects—think Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift. The trend up until now seemed to be artists searching for a delicate sound to trademark to their brand, rather than taking creative risks.
At the same time the world was anticipating Brat, Chappell Roan skyrocketed from forgotten one-hit-wonder to a superstar—selling out shows in minutes. Her danceable and straightforward gay lyrics are like nothing else pumped out by major labels and people are eating it up. Both Roan’s Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and Charli’s Brat are hedonistic dance albums, but only the latter touches the spectrum of current pains while sounding novel.
The lyric, “I just want to go real hard,” kicked off Charli’s pandemic album How I’m Feeling Now, made for Club Quarantine, a Zoom dance party hosted by Charli and other club kids. How I’m Feeling Now was a daydream of nightlife to get people through those isolating times. Brat shifts to the present moment with the command, “bumpin’ that” repeating from the first track, “360” to the concluding “365.” Brat’s lyrics are about doing things and doing them now.
Explored in the tail-end track, “I think about it all the time” many young people feel like there might not be a future, at least not a future you can rely on. The whiplash between Charli’s musing on motherhood to impulsive coke use between “I think about it all the time” and “365” is intentional. Gen Z has their adult life ahead of them, they’re thinking of retirement funds, parenting, and careers, but does any of that matter when it feels like the whole world is in free-fall? Why not do a little key and bump that while everything around us burns down.