Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you’re probably familiar with the album campaign-turned-cultural phenomenon that is Brat. Released last June, Charli XCX’s sixth album not only defined the visual style of the summer – a welcome antidote to 2023’s Barbiecore – but also captured the zeitgeist of a chronically-online generation, plagued by existential crises.

As the artist put it herself, a brat is “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party, and maybe does dumb things sometimes, who feels herself but then also maybe has a breakdown”.

It’s a sound that harkened back to XCX’s early years in music, which found the nascent artist uploading songs to MySpace, before throwing herself headlong into the London rave scene. It was here that the first traces of Brat came to be, though it would take years for XCX to realise her pop masterwork.

The Essex siren’s first brush with greatness came with a feature on the radio hit ‘I Love It’, with Swedish pop duo Icona Pop in 2012, while she later sang the chorus to Iggy Azalea’s ‘Fancy’ in 2014. Her debut album True Romance arrived between those chart-topping singles, and while it was well-received, Charli was still refining the formula that would take her to international superstardom.

Nonetheless, throughout the 2010s, she balanced mainstream appeal and underground credibility to a degree that few could match. In 2016, the singer took her sound in a bold new direction, as she teamed up with her late, great producer and friend Sophie on Vroom, Vroom, a turbo charged EP of EBM-laced mania and post-pop abrasiveness.

It was during this year that she also brought on AG Cook as her creative director. A flurry of mixtapes followed, the most successful and critically-acclaimed being Pop 2, which offered a stunningly imaginative take on what 21st century pop could be.

That vision was further expanded on the follow-up albums, 2019’s Charli, How I’m Feeling Now and 2022’s Crash. The record continued XCX and Cook’s stream of pop experimentalism, with Crash also topping the charts in Ireland, the UK and Australia. The increased acclaim afforded her a new level of creative freedom, which would prove crucial to the creation of Brat, on which Charli took her world-building to fresh heights.

It’s a world of tabloid scandals, flip phones, MySpace profiles, poppers-induced mania and millennial Y2K obsession. The brash single ‘Von Dutch’ raised the Brat green curtain, while the video to the anthemic ‘360’ placed XCX in the pantheon of it-girls. The London rave scene comes to the fore, with the album peddling a collision of club-pop, electroclash and hyperpop.

The singer explained to Billboard that Brat is produced from a tight echo chamber of sounds to create “this unique minimalism that is very loud and bold”. The follow-up remix version – Brat And It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat – proved another zeitgeist-defining hit, complete with reworkings from the likes of Lorde, Billie Eilish, Bon Iver, Ariana Grande more.

The songs themselves are situated within the carefully-outlined parameters of XCX’s high-low artistry; they’re chaotically minimalist but fluorescently vibrant, suffused with sticky pop hooks, built to soundtrack an epic after-party.

But for all its synth bravado, Brat is an album of remarkable vulnerability. The sweat-beaten riffs propel narratives of insecurity, and on ‘Girl, So Confusing’ she muses, “Yeah, I don’t know if you like me / Sometimes I think you might hate me”. On ‘Apple’, meanwhile, she details generational trauma over a thumping dance number.

As with the record as a whole, the track snarls with biting honesty. And with Charli hitting Malahide Castle this June, expect a state-of-the-art pop masterclass brimming with energy and attitude. Buckle up: we’re in for another brat summer.

Charli XCX plays Malahide Castle on June 17.

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