Reflecting on BRAT Summer: Embodying Who We Can Be, While Facing What We’re Not
It’s neon green, a color you wouldn’t immediately gravitate to. With its slightly blurred lowercase lettering, at first the brat cover looks like a moniker for an artist rushing through an album release. But, this assumption is exactly what Charli XCX was aiming towards as she created an album cover that could “evoke the bluntness and directness of the music I wanted to make.” What could be interpreted as a self-indulged eyesore still carries a vibrant uniqueness that stands out, inviting intrigue. The mix of brash confidence with direct confrontation is only a part of the environment Charli XCX makes with brat. These dualities construct the music of brat and bring it into the persona that would envelop “brat summer.”
A formal definition of brat is someone who is annoying and spoiled. But in the world Charli XCX has created, it’s a mode of existence that embodies the dualities and multiplicity that are our experience with the self. Her creative director, Imogen Strauss, has said “being brat can mean so many things. At its core it’s bold, it’s a little messy.” Charli herself has described a brat as a mix of “a girl who is a little messy and likes to party,” “say dumb things sometimes,” “feels herself but has a breakdown” and “honest, blunt, volatile.” On the surface the brat persona is driven by the party girl image that Charli herself embodies. But in reality it goes beyond such a narrow image into something more complex. During her Billboard Women in Music interview, Charli XCX explained “brat behavior comes from insecurities… a combination of ultra confidence, yet ultra vulnerability.” Audiences have taken this as a form of authenticity rather than needing to create a new self-image. With the persona Charli has created for brat, people show up as their best selves even if it looks jarring, messy or a bit distasteful and having fun. But this works in a special way unlike other hyper confident music releases because brat also has the side of looking at your shortcomings, failures, insecurities and jealousies that hurt you and others. Holding these contrasts together comes at a time when Gen Z (a large part of Charli XCX’s music base) is looking for such a social influence.
brat has been labeled as hyperpop in its commercialization, mainly in part of Charli XCX’s foundational role in hyperpop, despite her expressing a disassociation with genres. Hyperpop is a form of electronic pop music that exaggerates traditional pop elements. This may lead to lyricism heavily focused on catchy hooks or melodies and loud walls of sound using distortion or glitches in production. If anything, brat is a dance pop record meant to be played in dance halls. It has less of the dramatic hyperpop cuts in comparison to her traditional hyperpop sleeper hit “Vroom Vroom” or album How I’m Feeling Now. Instead she follows a minimal approach to electronic music, she told Resident Advisor. “The production has a lot of space to breathe. Each element can be heard.” But even in its minimal production approach, it’s still a club record meant to be danced to while struggling with “internal turmoil.”
Other than being a great album, brat is a cultural point. It meets society with a message that it needs to hear. The 2020s summer music and cultural landscape have been unpredictable. The decade started with slow, mellow sounds and melancholy lyricism of “sad girl music” to process the pandemic and quarantine, which eventually moved to elements of hot girl summer and the return of dance music to encourage people to go back to having fun. Gen Z has had to experience a stark emotional music landscape. It was either sitting with despondent feelings that began to feel suffocating or feigning to feel hyper confident when they weren’t ready to. brat takes this pendulum and slows it down, allowing people to see the range of who they are . The album is a meeting of self care and healing culture and hyper confident “I’m that girl” energy, but with themes of vulnerability. brat sits in the messiness, pitfalls, shortcomings, and carries them in tandem with ego and pride. It’s looking directly at your shortcomings, holding in a sob while working angles in your best outfit. Trying to grasp or encompass all our multiplicities can at times feel like speeding thoughts, which Charli XCX captures and slows down long enough for her and us to grapple.
Much of brat discusses themes Gen Z and Millenials are currently facing or coming to terms with. There’s the encountering of generational trauma in “Apple,” the existential dread/excitement of starting a family in “I think about it all the time” and the boundless emotional grief that has entered our lives since Covid is presented in the death of a friend on “So I.” “Sympathy is a knife” and “I might say something stupid” address themes of social anxiety and feeling out of place or unworthy by speaking truth to the feelings we’re too scared to admit.
“I might say something stupid” has the melodic underpinnings of someone who feels like they don’t belong or is unworthy in a place that meant so much to them. The lyrics “door is open / let in / but still outside” encapsulate the feeling of being in a place as an outsider. You become a shadowy figure who desperately wants to be seen, but is not taken seriously. It’s a grief of watching the effort you’ve put in to be recognized has left you passed over.
Charli XCX approaches these conversations with an undeniable authenticity that allows us to be honest with ourselves. The lyricism and production of brat make processing these tough topics fun and accessible. “I’m over the idea of metaphor and flowery lyricism and not saying exactly what I think,” Charli said when discussing her lyrical inspiration. “This record is all the things I would talk about with my friends, said exactly how I would say them. It’s in ways very aggressive and confrontational, but also very conversational and personal.” She was writing lyrics that she would say in a conversation, which brings relatability because it alludes to the same dialogue or manner of speaking we would engage with in our own circles. The sound of the album allows you to feel at ease. Suddenly the things you’re scared to face are danceable and melodic and you can sit with the emotion, slowly processing it.
The feelings from the lyrics go hand in hand with the song composition. “Sympathy is a knife” lyrically sounds like uncensored racing thoughts driven by insecurity and compulsive comparison. The narrator is tense, stuck in a torrent of uncontrollable feelings. The feelings of tension are recreated in production with a lack of resolution between the notes. Ethan Hein writes on how often in the song, the notes don’t shift to what’s expected or stay in key with each other. This creates a dissonance and unpredictability in the composition which would correspond to the emotional landscape of the song. Hein writes, “the harmony and production work together to suggest a person struggling to hold it together emotionally.” The instrumentation of “Everything is Romantic” takes on its own journey which depicts the steady realization of the beauty of life Charli sings about. It goes from slow orchestral strings to a faster rhythm as the first verse repeats. Once the chorus comes in, it sounds like most of the instruments fall out and are replaced with cuts of hyperpop sound introducing a dance beat. The second verse is introduced by returning to the wistful sounds of the first verse. For the outro, Charli’s voice is distorted, becoming clearer as the song ends. Lyrically, the song’s verses are observations. This is where the song is more slow-paced and sonically evokes a wistful nature. The chorus and outro become the sudden realizations; here, the production becomes distinct, nearly depicting the joyous epiphany of realizing that “everything is romantic.”
A major moment of brat has been “Girl, so confusing (the remix)” ft. Lorde. On the original “Girl, so confusing” version, Charli XCX sings about a girl she seems to be in competition with but wants to be friends with, but also may not always feel comfortable around. There’s a lot of ambiguity about where their relationship stands. The two seem so different from each other though people see them in the same light, which only further strains their relationship to each other. The song’s addressee Lorde would show up on the song’s remix, an opportunity for Charli and Lorde to work out their issues together. They air out how the other has made them feel, reaching a mutual sense of levity in this confrontation. We often project our insecurities in ways that hurt others and create interpersonal conflict.
The moment may have been so important because of the possibility it created. It showed that these lost friendships or frenemy tensions can be resolved. The conversation between Charli and Lorde seems so simple; all it takes is being honest with someone about how they make you feel to heal the insecurities between the both of you. It initiates introspection about how we are letting our insecurities guide our interpersonal relationships. The “Girl, so confusing” remix resonated with the yearning many people have about lost friends or people they can’t seem to get along with. The long-held imagination of fixing things appeared more attainable when we saw two women choosing to do it in front of the world.
brat and its ensuing summer aren’t a plane of temporality, but a mode of existence. The clarity gained from the introspection, channeling confidence we had pushed to the back of our minds and finally confronting our insecurities are what brat leaves us with. These, among more takeaways, aren’t static things limited to one season of the year or one season of life. It's an impact that brings us closer to our true selves even with the rough parts. Charli XCX created an album that she wanted to move our hearts and minds. We’re left embodying our full 360 facing the insecurities about our future, our worth to other people and uncertainty about who we are, while embodying renewed confidence pertaining to our value, career and social interactions.