Welcome to Defector Music Club, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album. Here, Israel Daramola, Lauren Theisen, Patrick Redford, and Rachelle Hampton share their thoughts about Charli XCX's summer smash Brat.
Israel Daramola: This is a little bit of an unorthodox music club selection, as it's much newer than what we typically pick. But in that spirit, let me ask, how do you feel about the album of the summer?
Lauren Theisen: Charli’s come a long way from when I saw her tour with Bleachers at a half-sold theater and a huge chunk of the crowd left when Jack Antonoff finished his set. That was back when she was still trying hard to appeal to the Top-40-radio straights, before a run of hugely influential, balls-to-the-wall dance mixtapes reinvented her as the patron saint of warehouse parties. While her last few proper album releases have felt like they’ve been hindered by record-label politics, Brat is a triumphant full-circle moment where Charli’s earning that mainstream success without compromising her vision. I’m thrilled that, like, D.C. politics operators who’ve never done poppers have had to learn about this record, and I’m particularly impressed that an album that seems very much about trying to keep partying into your 30s is resonating with The Youth. (At least, I think it is. I’m out of touch.) The Gay Agenda is working.
Patrick Redford: The first time I spun through this record, I thought Wow, this sounds so good, but I wish this wasn’t written in English because so many of these lyrics are hilariously unsubtle, and then I kept listening and kept listening and eventually I came around to being truly impressed with the cohesive whole she paints with relatively simple colors. It’s like they made a whole pop record out of the nonsense seven-word loops you hear over a house track, which is a compliment. It’s funny to regard the world-bestriding phenomenon of Brat next to how ersatz of an album this actually is, musically speaking. They went pastiche mode on every vaguely electronic sound that came out of the bloghouse and post-bloghouse era and made something more ambitious and strange than any of the brand-ready TikTokification would have you think.
Rachelle Hampton: So I came pretty late to Brat; I only started spinning the entire album within the past week. When it came out, I was taking a break from most social media and social life, so my only real awareness of it came from the tracks that turned into TikTok trends ("Apple," and the "Girl, so confusing" remix with Lorde). I was kind of passively into the snippets I heard and impressed with the scale of her rollout—it was immediately clear that this was the summer of Charli (and Chappell Roan). Now that we’re in that golden era between summertime sadness and seasonal depression, Brat has been fun to bump while running my little errands. Still, I think the whole phenomenon of Brat and the way it’s managed to capture the kind of multi-generational coalition that politicians aspire to is more interesting to me than the album itself.
Israel: I’ve always enjoyed Charli’s brand of dance-pop, particularly when it leans more dance than pop, and I’ve long felt that she should be treated like a bigger star, so I was both happy and a little surprised that this was the one that truly did it for her. Which isn’t to say I’m not bumpin dat, bumpin dat, just that I did not expect such a breakthrough. But I do think it has a lot to do with what Lauren is talking about where this is a proper release, free of label chicanery and also just a specific point in time for things to get a little weird. This is also the most online-pilled album I’ve heard in a long time, so I guess that plays a huge role in the response to it.
Lauren: I think it’s fair to hit it from those angles, Iz and Patrick—to poke holes in the lyrics or talk about it in relation to the internet. But I also feel such a keen sense of connection to this album because Charli, three years older than me, has made a record about aging. “Club classics” in particular sounds to me like an artist statement, where she’s namechecking these EDM people (including Sophie, R.I.P.) who really defined cool and experimental dance music for me when I was in college. There’s a tangible sense of time passing, of Charli kind of finding a comfort level between 32 years old and her wilder, more juvenile impulses, and it gives a real weight to Brat that isn’t captured by the memes.
Patrick: Yeah, to your Jack Antonoff point, she was grinding for a decade or so in half-empty rooms, so it’s hard for me to be cynical about any of the choices she makes. Even “Mean girls,” whose vibe I was embarrassed to have been able to instantly diagnose, is doing something sonically that is worth taking seriously despite the reheated Red Scare leftovers three full years past the sell-by date. The posture that song takes, too, is more interesting than pure pandering to trust-fund freaks doing coke in the Clandestino bathroom. “Unapologetic” and “Vulnerable” are overused frames to think about pop stars, particularly women, and they’re often cast as forces that good pop albums balance. Though there are moments of each on Brat, “Mean girls,” which I don’t like, is impressive for its brashness and confidence. Cockiness is the word (the album is called Brat) and her way of advancing past those tired narratives. She’s earned the right to be wrong in interesting ways.
Israel: I kind of don’t know how to talk about this album without the context of the internet. Not just because of the lyrics and its references to things that also fascinate whole swaths of the internet, but also because it feels like the album rollout (and this is genius on her part) has incorporated an online dialogue alongside the music. The music video with internet “it girls” like Rachel Sennott, Emma Chamberlain and Julia Fox. Her “indie sleaze” birthday party. The Kamala stuff. Describing an early-20s woman as coquettish. It hasn’t all been intentional, but at the same time it's almost like a speak-it-to-existence kind of thing. But I do believe that once you get past the “too online” outer shell, you’ve got a really intricately made project that is about getting older, like Lauren mentioned, and about a wistful nostalgia for, of all things, the 2000s, which is still so funny a concept to me.
Lauren: And none of this works, either the marketing or my personal connection to it, if the pop songs don’t do the pop-song things so effectively. For as much as I love Pop 2, which for a long time was the album I put on to chill myself out while boarding an airplane, Brat might represent a new career high for Charli. There are songs that just bang you into submission with their abrasive catchiness, like “Von dutch,” but they’re balanced out by prettier, tightly produced tracks like “Talk talk.” I heard the latter in the gift shop of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and it basically made my day—both that Charli has Midwest fans and that the song is such a pleasant piece of ear candy.
Israel: Speaking of those pop songs doing pop things, which ones do we think stand out the most? I do love “Club classics,” “Girl, so confusing,” and “Rewind,” but my favorites might be a little surprising. I really think “Everything is romantic” is a perfect record, particularly in its breakdown/beat switch, and “Mean girls” is so silly but so fun.
Rachelle: Lauren accurately clocked me as a Midwest fan of ear candy. I think “Talk talk” is probably my favorite track on the album. “360” is irresistible, too, and I really like “B2b,” maybe because the opening reminds me of “Track 10,” which is one of my favorite Charli songs.
Lauren: I don’t think there’s a wrong answer to this question, but I also want to shout out the video for “Von dutch,” which is this really savage and aggressive trip through an airport. I like that it’s not trying to grab you with a buzzy cameo or anything. It’s just, like, Hm, yeah I could definitely headbutt a camera to this beat.
Patrick: “B2b” is my favorite as well, as it seems like the most coherent synthesis of the album’s whole Is it a club record constructed of pop songs or a pop record constructed of club songs? thing. It’s both, and there’s so much fun in the way that balance is tweaked and played with both on the album and on this song. What I like most about Brat is how much it works as an album. The whole is more than the parts, and the best parts—"B2b,” “Talk talk,” “360/5”—are the ones that get this ambitious pop/club balance right.
Israel: I think “B2b” is the reason people on my TL started calling this album Gay Yeezus.
Rachelle: Gay Yeezus is perfect.
Patrick: In a posh-ass restaurant / hurry up with my ketamine (shut up, it works if your accent is warbled enough). On that note, what did you think was Brat’s “I Am A God”—in other words, its low point, if you think it has one? (For my money, it’s the slow stuff, the SOPHIE song and the one about the baby.)
Lauren: None, really. “Sympathy is a knife” was sort of an “uh-oh” moment for me when I first heard it, because the chorus feels so sonically disconnected from the verses and the core simile is pretty weak and there’s the line about buying a gun. But upon repeated listens I gravitate to that wicked bass melody and can groove to it. In every song on Brat, I hear the redeeming qualities.
Israel: Lol. “Sympathy is a knife” was also going to be my choice, though I don’t hate it. But I don’t hate “I Am A God” either.
Rachelle: This is totally TikTok’s fault, but I skip “Apple” most often because I’ve heard it too many times at this point.
Lauren: One of my notes is definitely that she says “apple” too much on “Apple.”
Patrick: The airport 😫 the airport 😵💫 the airport 🤪
Rachelle: Speaking of TikTok though, we have to talk about the “Kamala is brat” moment, right? I think that, along with seeing Brat emblazoned on a neon green port-a-potty in Prospect Park, was when I realized Oh, this has escaped containment.
Israel: Sigh, unfortunately we do. I don’t know that “Kamala is brat” in and of itself bothered me—politicians try to capitalize on what’s cool and current all the time. I think it mainly bothered me how well and how quickly it worked. I do wonder what someone that isn’t terminally online thinks when they hear “Kamala is brat.” In general, I do think this album has become too viral to the point of almost gibberish. Does it matter in the long run? No. We just kind of consume and decontextualize culture at rocket speed now. I fully expect a backlash in the coming months, but then a backlash to the backlash just as quickly.
Lauren: I think it was hilarious to post that with no follow-up. We’re long past Twitter as a collection of everyone’s most half-assed and inconsequential thoughts, but it really doesn’t have to mean more than that. Part of the spirit of Brat is “just kinda saying things.”
Rachelle: It didn’t bother me that much either, and I agree that there’s not a ton of meaning to be made from it. But speaking to Israel’s point, it seems to say a lot about the reach of this album, which did come as a surprise to me. Maybe it's because of how long Charli’s been grinding. I expect to see her doing a Boiler Room set; I did not expect to see a Brat anarchist flag at the DNC. There’s a warp speed that we’re moving at right now in terms of cultural dissemination, and it’s picking up people that I wouldn’t have anticipated just a few months ago.
Patrick: I think P.E. Moskowitz hit this nail on the head when they wrote a long, thoroughly considered take on the “Kamala is brat” phenomenon and the simultaneous power and limits of the vibe shift that this album either brought about or personified, depending how close you live to the Myrtle-Broadway JMZ stop. There’s a faint “Smiling through it all! Can’t believe this my life!” sense that absolutely works better in the context of a pop album than it does for someone auditioning to be the one who rubber-stamps a genocide. A vibe can only do so much, and I find something faintly nihilistic about the wholesale enbrattification of the DNC. You can only blame someone so much for how their work is used once it breaks contain as strongly as this, but the “brat = Kamala” thing is an unfortunately neat symbol of the (at least momentary) victory of vibes over anything material, in the political sense. Don’t just take my word for it—she said it herself to New York this past week.
Lauren: Yeah, running through all the love for Brat, and what makes it the perfect club record for people who’ve been at the club for a long time, is that allure of eternal youth, which is really eternal freedom from consequences. It’s badly needed escapism for normal people, but it doesn’t mix well when it butts up against the real seat of power. Brat belongs on Fire Island, not in the White House.
Defector's Favorite Jams Right Now
Judee Sill - "Crayon Angels"
Judee Sill is like if Carole King had heroin psychosis, and was also good. One of several cult-favorite, dead-too-young singer-songwriters from the '60s and '70s, Sill's commercial failure of a debut album is best known today for "Jesus Was A Crossmaker"—a beautiful and blasphemous ballad with a jittery, propulsive melody and kind of a genius rhyming structure. But it's the opener, "Crayon Angels," that serves as an intoxicating invitation into Sill's world. The vocals are gorgeous and soft and make room for a catchy oboe showcase, but a closer listen to the lyrics reveals an inner tumultuousness. "Phony prophets stole the only light I knew / And the darkness softly screamed / Holy visions disappeared from my view / But the angels come back and laugh in my dreams." Those are haunting lines, and the tension between her pain and the fact that you can drift off to sleep with Judee Sill in the background continues to attract people to her music 45 years after her death. Nobody ever made demons sound so pretty.
-Lauren
Cash Cobain - "Fisherrr"
It is August, and therefore I am seeing a lot of reflections on the various "songs of the summer." It's an utterly meaningless moniker, except as a way to keep music writers busy with something to argue about. People like to elect "song of the summer" as though they were voting for homecoming king: finding the perfect song to exemplify the spirit of the season and the general vibe of the moment. Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" is a song of the summer, as is Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe," Tinashe's "Nasty," and pretty much any song off Brat. But to me a true test of the song of summer is actually hearing it outside, wherever it is you find yourself.
I've heard "Not Like Us" against my will what feels like 700 times. But when I think about the summer of 2024, I will think of it as the "slizzy summer" and it began with Cash Cobain's "Fisherrr." Cash Cobain is both the young rapper and the producer of the moment, with his syrupy sample blends of recognizable R&B/hip-hop records from the 90s and 2000s into pulse-setting, club music inflected jams that have amounted to the sub-genre of "sexy drill." That and the lusty and often graphic lyrics on top of those beats coalesce into something that's too horny to be completely romantic but too tender to just be crass and gross. Cash Cobain and the other slizzy gang affiliates like Vontee the Singer, Bay Swag, and Chow Lee have created a new New York sound and energy that is infectious and club ready and has brightened up any good party I've been to, or just worked as an appetizer bleating out of the speakers of passing cars on the way to the subway. And as a producer, everyone from Drake to Lil Yachty to Fabolous are clamoring to get on one of his beats.
-Israel
Khruangbin - "People Everywhere (Still Alive)"
As my date with Khruangbin at the Greek Theater a few weeks back came closer, I became obsessed with trying to answer what feels like the eternal question about them, which framed their New York Times Magazine profile this past spring: Are they actually doing anything innovative and serious, or is this just email-job-background-music-algorithm slop, designed to pacify millennials who want to soothe their dinner party guests with inoffensive, edgeless vibe music?
The formula is extremely simple: Each of the three members of the band is really good at playing their instrument, and they each enhance each other's abilities. The gestalt is a relatively chill one, though it rewards close attention. I could not believe how the guitar guy handled his instrument, making it yowl, warble, reverberate, squiggle, and almost sound like it was singing at times. The other two members are just as essential, though he's the secret sauce. They played their latest album all the way through, took a short break, then re-emerged for a far jammier second set, which is where I, under pharmacologically ambitious conditions, answered the question.
No background-music-ass band could play with such synchronicity and confidence, together, for so long and be so locked in. It was great! And they were great, and probably at their best when they turned perhaps their most popular song, "People Everywhere (Still Alive)," from a straight-ahead two-minute song into something wilder, meaner, and—critically—four times as long. I don't want to sound like a Grateful Dead person or whatever, but all bands should jam more during their live shows. If I am seeing guitar music, I want to see people who can play their shit at a super-high level, not just people who've memorized one way to play a song.
-Patrick
