In 2024, a hit song is more like something you can’t escape than something you can measure. There are countless charts and services and data dumps that measure streams and memes and airplay and anything else you can count. But none of them can fully explain “Brat Summer” — the cultural phenomenon surrounding British singer-songwriter Charli xcx’s latest studio album, “Brat,” that has stretched well past summer and into next year.
Released last June, “Brat” has spawned many popular songs — four of its tracks are up for Grammys, as is the album itself — but no true breakout single. Yet it has spread its distinctive shade of light green all across Western culture, inspiring a bazillion memes and outfits and catchphrases (“Bumpin’ that,” “So Julia” and, of course, whether something is or isn’t brat) and themed nightclub events like “Night of 1,000 Charlis.” Most surreal of all, after Charli tweeted “Kamala is brat” in July, it was even incorporated by Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ campaign, to the astonishment of its creator.
Agata Serge for Variety
With that kind of cultural saturation, the songs are the gateway and the fuel for something much bigger. The “Brat” experience is an unusual combination of a loosely defined concept album and a virtuoso social-media marketing campaign, which could be anathema to some old-school music purists but is actually a huge expansion of the artist’s palette. For her skill in juggling all of these disciplines, Charli xcx is Variety’s Hitmaker of the Year.
“Charli has an unrelenting vision of who she is,” says Jack Antonoff, Grammy-winning producer for Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde and many others and Charli’s friend for more than a decade. “There’s no part of her that’s gonna pander in any direction, and she’s always been like that.”
For culture-shifting musicians such as Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Drake, Ariana Grande and, to an increasing degree, Charli, music is only a percentage of the overall picture that we’ll call their brand. It’s marketing, photography, videos, memes, social-media presence, product lines, pop-up shows and other surprises. The art of managing a career is figuring out how all of those things add up to a vast and unified cultural presence — and the trick is how to be everywhere in such an interesting way that people don’t get tired of you.
Charli understands that, and has been putting it into action relentlessly since early this year. Looking at just one recent stretch: On Nov. 16 she aced her double-duty appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” appearing in nearly every skit and performing two songs from the album. Two days later, she played a surprise pop-up concert in Times Square, sponsored by H&M and alerted that day via Instagram, where the giant screens in the world’s most famous sensory-overload location exploded with “Brat” iconography. On Nov. 21, she was announced as a top performer at the Coachella festival in April, and the following day, the now-famous “Brat” billboards popped up outside arenas across the North America, teasing a spring tour (following her autumn arena tour with Troye Sivan). On Nov. 23 she resumed the tour in the U.K. with a buzzy London club show preceding four arena dates through Dec. 2. Five after that, she’ll be 5,500 miles away, in Los Angeles at Variety’s Hitmakers celebration.
Open up Instagram and there she is in an Acne Studios ad, or an actually quite funny Google spot with Sivan where they’re shooting a video using products they bought on ShopWithGoogle. Or the H&M ad. Walk down the street in a metropolis and that gross shade of green, on a bus or someone’s jacket, evokes “Brat” even if it has nothing to do with it. She’s poured every waking hour into promoting and expanding that brand.
“You make time for the things that you love,” she says wearily, spilled onto a couch in a Brooklyn studio on a sunny November morning, dark shades on, before yet another photo shoot. “But I also don’t really sleep these days. 2020 … um, what year is it?,” she laughs rhetorically. “2024 has not been a very restful year, for sure.”
* * *
For more than a decade, Charli XCX been one of the most innovative and influential singer-songwriter-producers in pop music, pushing the genre further to the left, fusing her melodic instincts with the boundary-pushing production techniques she hears in clubs and from her collaborators; she’s a patron saint of the subgenre called hyper-pop (usually with an eye-roll). But even with that status — which would be more than enough for most musicians — she is an easily bored creative who is always looking for something different to inspire that creativity.
Agata Serge for Variety
She can write a hit song pretty much any time she wants. Her career took off in 2012 as the songwriter-producer behind Icona Pop’s “I Love It”; two years later she topped the U.S. charts with her Iggy Azalea collaboration “Fancy”; in 2019 she co-wrote Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes’ global smash “Señorita”’; and she scored a surprise hit herself last year with “Speed Drive,” from the “Barbie” soundtrack. Yet superstardom was elusive. She’d tried playing a more traditional pop game with 2022’s “Crash,” which was her best-charting album before “Brat,” although it didn’t lead to a major breakthrough.
But in the spring of 2023, she presented her team with what has been described as the “Brat Manifesto,” a mood board and binder full of PDFs and notes for “Brat,” a full year before the album was released. Therein lay the master plan for the endless Brat Summer.
“Usually when I’ve made a record, there is this transitional phase [after it’s recorded] where I’m thinking about how to present the music,” she says. “But with this one, I actually did that first — I was thinking about marketing before I was making the music. I had the title first, which was such a brief and a super-useful writing tool. It put boundaries on the songwriting, because immediately if I was writing a song with [longtime collaborators] A.G. Cook or Cirkut, it would just immediately be like, ‘That’s not brat,’ and we would move on and do something that was brat.”
The term, of course, defies a hard definition, which is part of the allure. The closest she’s come to one took place during her “SNL” opening monologue: “Honestly, it’s just an attitude. It’s a vibe,” she explained, citing an example from Martha Stewart’s backlash to the “Martha” Netflix documentary. “Like, when Martha gets mad about an old magazine article and says she’s glad the journalist who wrote it is dead — that is brat,” she said. “And then when that exact journalist responded and said, ‘Hey! I’m alive, bitch!’ — that is extremely brat.’”
Charli’s longtime record label, Warner Music’s Atlantic, is used to surprises from her, but that doesn’t mean the company got it right away. “I think I’ve always been seen as a bit of an outsider,” she says (when her interviewer suggests “outlier” instead, she replies, “Sure, I’ll take that!”). “It was something my record label perhaps saw… as not a weakness, but something they didn’t quite know what to do with. And I think this manifesto — although it feels so funny to call it that — was making super clear that it was the kind of thing we needed to lean into. Like, why don’t we market music like fashion and cultivate this desire, where everybody wants to get the new drop? I suppose there is an exclusive kind of feeling to that, but once you’re inside, it’s very inclusive. I think if [artists or art are] too readily available, it becomes too easy and a bit boring.”
Isra Ali, a clinical assistant professor of media culture and communication at New York University, calls the “Brat” campaign a “tactical coup” for the artist. “Charli is clearly in direct conversation with her niche audience and is making them feel like they’re a part of it, but she’s also figured out how to do this on a scale that is generating a lot of interest among a much larger audience,” Ali says. “If a celebrity, or anyone who’s trying to advertise or market something, figures out how to convey authenticity while also branding really effectively, it’s a magical combination.”
The vibe is cool, fun and irreverent, but the secret sauce is actually vulnerability, a willingness to be messy and imperfect and sad sometimes. “The whole idea of being a brat is interesting to me, because why are people brats?,” Charli asks. “Why do people act out and be difficult and misbehave? I think it’s because sometimes you’re overcompensating for insecurity or feeling uncomfortable, and I think that’s where the two fit together.”
Agata Serge for Variety
Indeed, despite the rapper-level braggadocio in songs like “Von Dutch” (“It’s OK to admit that you’re jealous of me”), insecurity is a huge part of the lyrics on “Brat,” which are far more personal and detailed than her previous work. She sings about everything from obsessing over her weight or the shape of her face to whether or not it’s time to have a baby with her fiancé, George Daniel, a producer and the drummer of top British group the 1975. “My insecurities are not based on the way that I create,” she says of the dichotomy. “They’re based on the way that I look, the way that I feel in a room full of people who sometimes intimidate me, and not being good enough, feeling like an outsider, whatever. I think sometimes people aren’t honest about that, although maybe everyone else in the world is Zen as fuck and doesn’t feel like that,” she laughs. “We live in this world where we’re so bombarded with crazy beauty standards, we’re constantly on our phones, we’re constantly looking at ourselves — it’s hard to not think about yourself as a commodity. But when it comes to my work, I just know — it’s instinct, I suppose, isn’t it?”
Daniel doubles down on the power of those qualities in her work. “Charli’s conviction, honesty and vulnerability are the most potent things that make her a brilliant artist and songwriter,” he says. “You believe absolutely everything she does.”
* * *
Charli’s path from budding pop star to cult artist to cultural phenom has been both a long slog and an overnight success story.
Charlotte Emma Aitchison was born on Aug. 2, 1992, in Cambridge, England and raised in nearby Start Hill, about 30 miles north of London. The only child of a Scottish father and a mother of Indian descent, she says she was bullied because of her background and was a loner as a child. Obsessed with Britney Spears and the Spice Girls, she showed musical talent early, learned to play guitar and keyboards and began posting songs she’d written onto MySpace as a teen. She even recorded an album entirely by herself, “14” (her age at the time), which was privately pressed but is easy to find on the internet.
“God, I hate that album so much,” she winces. “I haven’t listened to it for a decade, at least. It was sort of transitional — there are guitar[-based] songs on that record, but also elements of me exploring dance music. Some of those songs are terrible, but I think there was a style there, a direction, that a few people caught on to.”
The breakthrough came when she discovered club culture. “I did a few small acoustic gigs, but I never felt particularly myself, singing on a stage with a guitar,” she says. “It wasn’t until I was 14 or 15 and started going to raves that I felt inspired, performing with my iPod and a mic.” She continued in that direction, posting songs and releasing mixtapes, gradually expanding her pool of collaborators.
At 18 she left home to study at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art, but dropped out during her second year after signing with Warner’s Asylum Records. A.G. Cook recalls, “We had some mutual friends at her art school who said, ‘This girl joined; she makes music and is, like, signed to a record label!,’” he laughs.
While initially she struggled to find a direction, on a trip to Los Angeles to meet with producers she clicked with Ariel Rechtshaid, who would soon have success with Vampire Weekend, Haim and Sky Ferreira. In 2011, Charli released two of their collaborations as singles, “Stay Away” and “Nuclear Seasons,” which captured the attention of Pitchfork and the alternative media. At around the same time, a song she’d created with a different producer, Swedish-born Patrik Berger, was covered by the duo Icona Pop. “I Love It,” released in May 2012, became a global smash, topping the charts in the U.K. and becoming 19-year-old Charli’s first hit. Her debut album, “True Romance,” was released in early 2013.
Agata Serge for Variety
The following year, things got even bigger: “Fancy,” Charli’s collaboration with Iggy Azalea, topped the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks in the spring, and her own song, “Boom Clap” (still her biggest U.S. solo single), peaked at No. 8 in the fall. Her sophomore album, the punkier “Sucker,” followed late in the year. But despite the success, which thrilled her management and label, it wasn’t where Charli wanted to be. “I was still finding my feet as a songwriter then,” she says. “There’s a lot of figuring-out on those records.”
She found her sound and her people in the PC Music collective, a loose group of songwriter-producers founded by Scottish musician Sophie (who died in 2021) that fused innovative, at times jarring digital sounds with sweet pop melodies. “When I was younger, I felt very alone in my creativity, and that was really sad to me,” she says now. “I love working with Ariel and Patrik, but it wasn’t until I met Sophie and A.G. Cook and all the people we’d work with that I really felt that I’d found people who understood my vision.”
Charli went all-in on the sound, collaborating with Sophie on the boundary-pushing “Vroom Vroom” EP, which left her previous work far in the rear-view mirror and perplexed her label and soon-to-be-former management. Even eight years later, “Vroom Vroom” is a rough ride, full of blaring sounds and lurching beats that deliberately clash with pop melodies. “In my scene it was a megahit,” Cook says, “but obviously the label was like, ‘This sounds nothing like “Fancy” and “Boom Clap.” This is a disaster!’”
Charli says, “I think sometimes that’s actually a really good sign, when people are like, ‘No, don’t do that, we don’t like it, we don’t get it.’ To me, that is a signifier that something will start a conversation, because other people are going to respond with ‘I like it.’”
And time has caught up with it. “‘Vroom Vroom’ is some of the most influential music of our time,” insists Antonoff. “Some of the things [artists] are most celebrated for were really concerning to people at first. If you don’t elicit some part of that reaction, you’re not furthering the story.”
Over the following months, Charli’s new sound began to coalesce as her collaboration with Cook deepened. She released two mixtapes in 2017, the second of which, “Pop 2,” is a hyper-pop landmark. That particular phase climaxed with the 2019 “Charli” album, which featured collaborations with Lizzo, Haim and Troye Sivan and such fan favorites as “1999” and “Blame It on Your Love.” But Charli had reached the end of a chapter and was looking for new inspiration. During the pandemic, she gave herself and Cook five weeks to make an album and emerged — on deadline — with “How I’m Feeling Now,” a strong but at times (understandably) rather manic set. Next came 2022’s “Crash,” the final album in her initial record deal with Atlantic U.K., for which she tried to play the pop-star game — another way of mixing things up to keep herself interested.
“I’d never really made a pop record in that classic, major-label type of way — working with an A&R [executive] and getting presented songs and things like that,” she says. “So yeah, that was me kind of playing at being a major-label pop artist. It’s funny now to see how ‘Brat’ has dwarfed it, because I was so prepared for this record to be just for my audience.”
In October, just six months after the release of “Brat,” Charli released a sibling album, a remix outing titled “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat” that overhauls every track. Unlike some alpha artists, she is not the least bit precious about her own work and welcomes radical reinventions, both lyrical and musical.
“I really wanted to flip out the songs, because that’s what really inspires me about dance music — how you can take one element from a song and completely morph it into something else,” she says. Most famously, Charli created new lyrical narratives around several of the songs. On the “Girl, So Confusing” remix, she and her friend Lorde publicly resolved some personal misunderstandings in the lyrics, literally “working it out on the remix” and closed the circle onstage at Madison Square Garden during Charli’s concert last September, where the two performed the song together for a rapturous audience. (Lorde’s verse includes the lines “You’d always say, ‘Let’s go out,’ but then I’d cancel last minute / I was so lost in my head and scared to be in your pictures / And your life seemed so awesome.”) She also collaborated with Ariana Grande, who brought her own views of fame and some innovative vocal stylings to the retake of “Sympathy Is a Knife,” and with Billie Eilish, who makes a sexually loaded come-on on “Guess” (“Charli likes boys but she knows I’d hit it.”) In the song’s video, crashes a bulldozer loaded with hundreds of pairs of underwear through a wall.
“For ‘Girl, So Confusing,’ the second I wrote it I was like, ‘I need Ella [Lorde] to be on a remix of this song,’” Charli says. “But I didn’t know how to approach it because obviously it’s a tricky situation. And when I finally did, she actually suggested, ‘Maybe I should do a verse.’ Within 24 or 48 hours she came back with that incredible verse, which made me really, really emotional. And Billie drove the bulldozer through the wall herself — she was like, ‘I do my own stunts!’”
Grande, meanwhile, “gravitated towards that song,” Charli says. “She had a lot to say. We went back and forth on the lyrics, talking about all the knives that we both felt in in this industry.”
* * *
Grande also offered encouragement for Charli xcx’s next act: acting.
She will guest star in Benito Skinner’s upcoming comedy series “Overcompensating,” as well as three indie films: the Gregg Araki thriller “I Want Your Sex,” starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman; Daniel Goldhaber’s remake of 1978’s “Faces of Death”; and Julia Jackman’s graphic-novel adaptation “100 Nights of Hero.” With Antonoff, she’s even co-written the music for David Lowery’s forthcoming film “Mother Mary.”
They’re all low-key appearances by design. “Everything’s been relatively small, and I’m enjoying learning about being on a set and learning from great directors and actors,” she says. “I hate it when musicians dive into a different field, head-first, without really researching or learning much of anything about it. So I did a lot of reading to educate myself over the past three or four years before I actually did anything.”
Polk Imaging
The encouragement from Grande came a couple of weeks before Charli’s “SNL” double-duty stint. “She’d obviously just done [‘SNL’ in September] and killed it, so I was getting tips,” Charli says. “She was just like, ‘You’re gonna be amazing, just relax, it’s so fun,’ but outside of her advice about contact lenses — which I ended up not going with on the night — I really heeded [Lorne Michaels’] advice, which was just to trust the process, go with the flow and not try and overly control things that would automatically get figured out along the way. I listened to that advice because, I mean, how can you not?”
At the end of a year filled with such major moments, Charli xcx is on the precipice of something she says she’s not sure she wants: major stardom.
“I don’t really know,” she sighs. “I’m kind of at this crossroads, I think, in my life now, where obviously my music has … yeah, reached this new level of success, I suppose,” she hedges, as if reluctant to actually say it. “A lot has changed for me with this record, and I do experience things like people taking my photo when I don’t necessarily want them to, or feeling like people in the room are watching me. Sometimes I love that feeling and sometimes I don’t, so I don’t think there’s really a cut-and-dried answer.”
But most importantly: Has she checked all the boxes on the Brat-ifesto?
“Oh,” she laughs, “I think we’re long past it!”