Charli XCX’s “Brat” album brought the music landscape to its knees when it was released in June, making 2024 the year of “brat summer.”
She’s furthered the brat universe with a reinvented version of the project titled, ‘‘Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat.”
The remix album finds each song with a new take on its already renowned older sibling. The 16-track collection features an elusive 18 artists including Bladee, A.G. Cook and Caroline Polachek, making space for each artist, big or small, to add to the song in their fashion. Landing somewhere between familiar and foreign, the compiled mixes are unrecognizable, yet still retain the dizzying shock value that listeners loved the first time around.
A notable feature among the remixes is pop singer Ariana Grande’s take on “Sympathy is a knife.” Grande creates an enticing blend of harmonies, layering on more emotions of the already deep cut and revealing lyrics. “It’s a knife when you know they’re counting on your mistakes / It’s a knife when you’re so pretty they think you must be fake / It’s a knife when they dissect your body on the front page / It’s a knife when they won’t believe you, why should you explain?” The duo acknowledges the pitfalls of fame, comparing slices of their previous misfortunes to metaphorical cuts and stabs.
Charli XCX recruits an unlikely trio of alt-rock icons on the project, The 1975, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes and Bon Iver. “Mean girls featuring julian casablancas” featuring Casablancas is a slightly stretched-out version of the original, giving him the ability to free his mind and speak directly to the so-called “mean girls.”
“I might say something stupid,” one of the original album’s already downcasted ballads, is even further broken down with the help of The 1975 and Jon Hopkins. It’s extremely similar to the classic ‘75 sound, joining the likes of their slower projects: ”I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are Beautiful Yet So Unaware” and “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships,” with major points of ambient negative space and the overlapping of textures and spoken word.
Bon Iver’s addition to, “I think about it all the time,” takes a soulful spin on the reflective song, leaving space for Charli XCX to add extremely personal touches to the lyrics. She’s battling the natural progression of time, balancing the weight of focusing on the fast-paced empire of a career she’s built over a decade, or taking the dedicated time to start a family. “And I’m exactly the same, but I’m older now / And I got even more stress on my body / So we had a conversation on the way home, ‘Should I stop my birth control? / ‘Cause my career still feels small in the existential scheme of it all,’” she ponders, in between the layered echoes of Bon Iver.
Navigating fame and falling in and out of the mainstream are both ideas that Charli XCX explored on her own in “brat,” but she had the chance to expand on her thoughts in “Guess featuring billie eilish.” Eilish and Charli XCX take a cheeky jab at “stan culture” and the obsessive nature that the public can have towards A-list celebrities and their personal romantic relationships.
“Talk talk featuring troye sivan” brings in the romantic anthemic rhythms that came with Sivan’s “Something To Give Each Other.” The lyrics revolve around a fast-forming relationship between two people who just met. Upbeat and filled to the brim with electronic beats, the track features the giddy excitement of unprecedented connections, even those that come with language barriers and catching long-haul flights.
Charli XCX and Sivan headed out on their “Sweat Tour,” combining sonic forces to create a cohesive stage presence. Indie artist Lorde and bubblegum pop singer Addison Rae joined the duo for their Sept. 23 concert at Madison Square Garden to perform their respective features, “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde” and “Von dutch a. g. cook remix featuring addison rae.”
Ultimately, the remix album reaffirms Charli XCX’s stance as a trailblazer, unafraid to confront the complexities of her own experiences, and those of others who experience her same ebb-and-flow level of popularity. In the act of deconstructing her work, she filters in the many perspectives of her peers, diving headfirst into unpacking the emotional tolls of maintaining a public persona.
