Charli XCX’s campaign for her newest album “BRAT” has been nothing but memorable. It started in May 2033 when she created a private Instagram page, called 360_brat, to post photo dumps, lyrics and snippets to tease her new music. In February 2024, she started teasing the album’s lead single “Von Dutch” and later remixed the song with Addison Rae.
Charli faced backlash leading up to the release of the album because of the now iconic acid green cover. She responded to the criticism on X, finding “the constant demand for access to women’s bodies and faces in our album artwork” to be “misogynistic and boring.” Later, her team created a “BRAT” generator website for anyone to create their own version of the cover, making her album inch closer to mainstream.
The album released June 7 to much anticipation and explores themes of partying, romance, insecurities and being a woman — all hidden behind loud synth beats. Charli’s hyperpop sound is nothing new, but “BRAT” feels straight from the 2000s indie sleaze era. It is the exact opposite of the clean girl aesthetic pop culture has gotten used to.
But what made 2024’s summer a brat summer?
The brat wall
In May, Charli livestreamed on TikTok and debuted an eye-catching green mural in Brooklyn, New York for her fans to enjoy. She popped out of a black SUV with a giant speaker to do an impromptu listening party and announce her next single “360.”
She later used the brat wall to announce the deluxe version of her album, by going live on TikTok as a muralist covered the green with white and added, “brat and it's the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not.” Charli last utilized the wall to announce her remix of “Girl, so confusing featuring Lorde,” who many fans suspected the song to be about.
Let’s work it out on the remix
Along with the album, Charli has released four remixes: “Von dutch featuring Addison Rae and a.g. cook,” “360 featuring robyn and yung lean,” “Girl, so confusing featuring Lorde” and “Guess featuring Billie Eilish.”
The most popular collaboration was “Guess” featuring Billie Eilish, earning over 110 million streams on Spotify. The song was already a club-classic with crazy beats from producer The Dare, but the remix adds to the provocative nature with Eilish’s lyrics like “don’t have to guess the color of your underwear” and “I saw them when you sat down, they were peekin' out.”
The two end the song with a dig at Taylor Swift, who blocked both Eilish and XCX in the charts earlier this summer by releasing variants of her “Tortured Poets Department” around the release date of both of their albums.
Charli is seemingly not done with remixes, as she teased one more remix on TikTok posting a video to “360” remixed with Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” saying with the caption “maybe one more remix and then?”
Is the apple rotten right to the core?
One of the biggest dance trends this summer was the “Apple dance” created by Kelley Heyer on TikTok. The dance utilized Charli’s titular song from the album and had multiple celebrities hop on the trend. Charli made videos doing the dance multiple times, with other names such as the “Twisters” cast, Stephen Colbert, Kim Kardashian, North West and even Olympic Athletes performing the dance.
TikTok users could not scroll without seeing the dance several times. However, lyrics expressing generational trauma are beneath the song’s fun exterior. Charli shares that while she realizes she is more like her parents than she thought, she gets to decide how similar she is.
Politics are “brat?”
In the height of “Brat summer,” an edit of Vice President Kamala Harris emerged with some of her most viral clips with a lime green filter over it. The song playing in the background was “360” and included Harris’s famous quote “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” from a speech in May 2023.
Once President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Harris’s campaign fully embraced “brat summer” with an X banner using the “Brat” logo to say “kamala hq.” Charli then took it upon herself to post “kamala IS brat” connecting the two.
Even though “Brat summer” may be over, Charli is far from done with the era. Later this month, she goes on tour with Troye Sivan for their Sweat tour, hopefully extending the momentum into a “Brat fall.”
