‘Brat’ Is a Year Old Now. Let’s Look at Its Legacy
Sonically, it holds up perfectly. Public perception of Charli xcx in the time since, though, may have soured just a tiny bit — or is that an illusion?
WHY SHE’S HERE: Long before brat summer, she was every gay pop music fan’s niche favorite
WHAT’S THE VIBE: Abrasive, thrilling, forthright
START HERE BUT ALSO KEEP READING: “360,” “Von dutch,” “Girl so confusing featuring lorde”
Lots of publications run retrospectives on albums when they turn 10 or 20. But what about a year after their release? That’s a great time to look back on whether you overhyped an album, how well it holds up, or if it really went overlooked. That’s just part of what Lavender Sound does with our 1-Year Anniversary columns.
Well, it happened again. On May 5, 2025, Charli xcx changed the artwork for one of her albums on streaming services — and this time, she did it for the very album that introduced her era of changing her LPs’ covers. Just shy of Brat, the album that transformed her from a cult favorite to a leading mainstream pop figure, turning a year old, Charli made Brat’s intentionally ugly artwork even uglier. She used haphazard brown scribbles to cross out the low-resolution “brat” in the center and put equally low-resolution, equally brown sound waves of the same color under it, and I have no idea what this means, and I feel like that’s by design.
I do, though, have a pretty good idea of what it means that, a year out from brat’s release (the album turns a year old this Saturday), Charli changing the LP’s art led to social media headlines and articles that are longer than even I, a passionate writer and big-time fan of Charli’s music, want to read about any album’s artwork. It means that Charli is officially someone whose every move is feverishly followed, for better and, a bit more often in 2025, for worse. It means that Brat wasn’t a flash in the pan of mainstream success. It means that Charli xcx is officially the leading pop figure she’s always yearned to be.
The thing about this transformation is that it couldn’t have happened without music so excellent that, after 10 years of Charli playing shows to audiences of just thousands, she could tour arenas and become such a monocultural sensation that, well, the Kamala thing happened and she had a whole summer named after her. And the music is truly excellent — Brat is one of the albums I had in mind when carving out the “Instant Classic” tier of our album review ratings here at Lavender Sound. The first time I, someone who hopped on the Charli bandwagon with Pop 2 at the end of 2017 and then rapidly gobbled up everything she’d done beforehand, heard Brat, I immediately knew that it was the culmination of everything Charli had tried to do and be over her 15-or-so-year career.
Press about the album in the run-up to its release hailed it as unprecedentedly personal for Charli or any pop musician, and none of the singles gave me that impression (though were they bangers nonetheless? Absolutely). But when listening to Brat for the first time and experiencing two of those singles opening the album and then segueing into “Sympathy Is a Knife” — a jerky, paranoid club number that somehow made allusions to suicidal thinking singalong-worthy — I knew I was in for a game-changing work of pop music. The rest of the album met that standard, as did the deluxe version that dropped three days later and, to some extent, the remix album that dropped last October. Brat is a watershed moment for pop music, and you really don’t need me to tell you that — if you’re part of Lavender Sound’s target audience, chances are you already agree. So instead I’ll just say that, in mainstream pop these days, maybe only Chappell Roan is getting as vulnerable as what you hear in a song like Brat’s “I think about it all the time,” and I hope pop music continues to be this honest.
At this point, I think the more salient conversation about Charli xcx’s reign ties into the somewhat prevalent notion that pop stars should be political figures who use their platforms to advance causes that benefit the people rather than the powers that be. It ties into the notion that, in most cases, one must sacrifice any leftist morals or values they have, or never make them public in the first place, to become or stay famous (no longer is Charli “famous but not quite,” to quote the haunting robo-ballad “I might say something stupid”).
Namely: How has Charli xcx managed to avoid major controversies or earn the unified ire of internet music listeners — think of how people came for Chappell Roan when she justifiably wouldn’t endorse a presidential candidate or when she demanded justifiable boundaries with her fans — while existing amid a swirl of unaddressed and likely flimsy rumors that, if true, wouldn’t go over well with many of her listeners both new and old?
I’d say the closest Charli has come to having a major controversy in the year since Brat is when she wore a sash saying “Miss Should Be Headliner” at a DJ set around the time of Coachella 2025, a festival that the legendary pop punk band Green Day headlined. This incident isn’t quite a controversy because Green Day responded in jest, and Charli responded to said response approvingly — but it was jarring. For starters, it really does take nerve to get basically second billing at the biggest U.S. music festival and still complain, even if jokingly. More importantly, though, taking this action that could’ve been misinterpreted as bashing Green Day is a bit wild when the band’s headlining set made waves for frontperson Billie Joe Armstrong changing a lyric in “Jesus of Suburbia,” from 2004’s widely beloved American Idiot, to “Running away from pain like the kids from Palestine.”
It’s not the best optics for Charli to wear a sash that could be perceived as coming for a band that just started a huge media ruckus by acknowledging that a genocide is happening in Palestine. It’s a choice that glosses over the fact that, as early as June 2024 and as recently as 2025, CNN and +972 Magazine alike — respectively center-right and center publications — have reported that tens of thousands of children in Palestine are dying of famine; during the week of May 19, headlines ran saying that 14,000 babies in Gaza could die of famine in 48 hours. I just can’t imagine seeing a headliner taking their moment in front of hundreds of thousands of people to call out a genocide that has eternally been pushed under the rug in the Western world and then thinking, “Maybe I should say I should’ve been the headliner.” But then again, it’s fully in character: Charli’s whole thing is that she’s a brat.
On the other hand, it’s kind of bold to do all that amid 2024 allegations, albeit ones that didn’t get much attention and were likely baseless, that Charli is a Zionist. These allegations are at most somewhat substantiated; see Reverse Canary Mission’s page on Charli xcx, which to me suggests that she has some relationships worth reconsidering and a habit of not thinking about the political beliefs of her friends, associates, and business partners and whether they’re worth challenging. This is the point I’m making: Once you reach a certain threshold of fame or really any meaningful public attention, does holding onto or advocating for leftist beliefs automatically sink your ship, or is it simply cowardice to avoid speaking up? Are you really at risk of losing it all?
I suppose one might indeed be at risk of losing it all — see Melissa Barrera, the ongoing insanity around Miss Rachel, and Kehlani being taken off a prominent concert bill for saying she’s anti-genocide. The minor online debate about whether Charli has pro-genocide beliefs reflects that the internet is always in defense mode, always ready to strike out and call out, precisely because, to navigate any industry with any power structure, you’ll likely come up on gatekeepers with horrendous values and morals, and like…can we really just enjoy things if we know they’re tainted? But overall, I wonder whether labeling someone who isn’t provably, even if possibly, pro-genocide as such defeats efforts to show the global population just how entrenched into our societal systems such genocides are.
Or, again, maybe we’re all so desperate to just feel good amid the flames of hell that we’re willing to give artists, especially the pop girlies, a pass for things that aren’t blatantly egregious — or maybe it’s just that Brat is too big to fail. Club music has rarely been produced for such a wide audience without its edges being sanded off or its futuristic elements being reduced to big-tent cliches.
“Von Dutch” would work perfectly at an EDM festival, yet as the electronics oscillate uncomfortably and Auto-Tune swallows Charli’s flexes about being kind of rich, the track becomes full of personality, giving the song a deeply compelling and highly replayable point of view. The chorus of the gleaming dance-pop song “Talk Talk” is as smooth and steely as liquid mercury, and the fact that it’s missing huge bursts of force in its percussive line only makes the pulsing synth line that much more immersive. “Spring Breakers” is the Brat sound — maximalist in its club vibes yet comparatively minimalist in the number of elements and tracks in the production — turned up to 12. It stabs, squeezes, and squelches in all manner of glory, making “hi it’s me you’re all in danger” sound like a wink rather than a threat.
Brat is mostly fun, often deeply personal, occasionally heartbreaking, always revelatory. It’s largely about its creator’s flaws, the very thing that those digging for controversy might want to mine. Charli obsesses over her face shape on “Rewind,” puts her foot in her mouth on “I might say something stupid,” thinks a little too highly of her prestige on “Club Classics.” “I wanna dance to me,” she claims on that last one, providing the perfect beat for doing so but also showing that she’s full of herself, though in a fun, cunty, winking way. On Brat, Charli’s best artistic tendencies and worst personal compulsions abound; to hold artists to perfection is to ignore that much of the best art comes from self-interrogation, from wanting to do better. That’s exactly what Charli strives for on Brat, and she absolutely achieves it. And she’s just as imperfect outside her music and in her public life — and for now, no controversy real or otherwise can quite derail that.
Please read this article. The current presidential administration is looking into sending U.S. citizens to prisons in El Salvador that are generally understood to be torture camps. This is analogous to Nazi Germany, as are many actions over the last 10 years of U.S. presidential administrations and Congressional politics; when I walked along the thousands-feet-long timeline of Nazi Germany that’s on display outdoors at Berlin, Germany’s Holocaust museum, it mapped near-perfectly onto said period. We are in danger. What will you do to help the people take back their power?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Max Freedman launched the LGBTQ+ music newsletter Lavender Sound in January 2025 to create an online writing community by and for LGBTQ+ people about LGBTQ+ music. They also interview artists for The Creative Independent, which is their favorite website (they really want you to read their Jaboukie Young-White interview), and they’ve previously contributed music criticism to Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, and Paste. Their pronouns are whatever float your boat ⛴️💜