Why Charli XCX's Brat Changed the Way We Talk About Pop

Charli XCX Brat, released in June 2024, did something that pop albums almost never do anymore: it defined a cultural moment. The album slime-green aesthetic, its chaotic club energy, and its unflinching lyrics about jealousy and insecurity became a shorthand for an entire attitude. Brat summer entered the lexicon within weeks.

Musically, Brat strips pop to its most abrasive and exhilarating. Produced primarily by A.G. Cook, the album beats are deliberately rough, distorted, and maximalist.

The lyrics operate on a level of honesty that mainstream pop avoids. Charli openly discusses envying other artists, questioning her own relevance, and the exhaustion of performing coolness.

The marketing was as influential as the music. The album cover, just the word brat in lowercase on a green background, became one of the most parodied and referenced images of the year.

The design is doing precise work. The green is one specific shade, hex 8ACE00, picked because it is slightly wrong: too acidic for a fashion campaign, too flat for a poster. The type is Arial Narrow, stretched and blurred, so it reads as a placeholder nobody replaced. It took the Grammy for Best Recording Package, a funny result for a cover engineered to look unmade.

Brat cultural impact extended beyond music. The album aesthetic influenced fashion, memes, and even political discourse. Its celebration of messiness and imperfection resonated widely.

Then she remade the whole thing. Brat and it's completely different but also still brat arrived in October 2024 with nearly every track rebuilt as a duet: Lorde on Girl, so confusing, Billie Eilish on Guess, plus Ariana Grande, Robyn, Bon Iver and Julian Casablancas. The Lorde version is the one that matters. It takes a song about resenting another woman and hands that woman the second verse to answer back. Pop music does not usually allow a reply.

The album is available on all streaming platforms. Follow Charli at https://www.charlixcx.com.

The Kamala Harris episode is the shorthand most people remember. Charli posted three words in July 2024 and within hours the campaign account had switched its banner to the same green and the same stretched type. It curdled inside a fortnight. Either way, it measures how completely a green rectangle had entered the culture.

If Brat is your entry point, go backwards. Pop 2, released in 2017 as a mixtape and largely produced by A.G. Cook, is where the sound was built, and half of what Brat does was already sitting there. How I'm Feeling Now was written and recorded in about five weeks during the 2020 lockdown, with fans watching on livestreams. Crash from 2022 was the deliberate major-label pop record she made before deciding she did not want to make those.

Brat matters because it proved that pop music can still be genuinely countercultural. In an era of algorithmic playlist fodder, Charli XCX made an album that demanded a reaction and changed how people talked about pop music for an entire year.

It won Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 2025 Grammys and lost Album of the Year to Cowboy Carter. The Sweat tour with Troye Sivan filled arenas that autumn. None of that is the point. The point is that a record about envy, ageing out of a scene and not being famous enough became the sound of a summer, which is a strange and quite funny outcome.