With her sixth album, Charli XCX has gone full-on Main Character mode, having recruited an army of internet it-girls to spread the hot girl gospel. Brat enlists the help of producers (and ex-PC Music heads) A.G. Cook and Easyfunn to hark back to the singer’s early blogosphere days with Eurodance-inspired tracks that take her back to the club. But that doesn’t mean Charli isn’t making her album roll-out an online frenzy, from all the clout-bombing – both the album’s lyrics and the music video for “360” is teeming with a cast of internet who’s-who, with appearances from Gabriette, Julia Fox and SOPHIE – to the highly meme-able album artwork, which is everywhere on our feeds. Beyond that, there are plenty of Extremely Online references to Twitter beefs and New York’s exceedingly bratty Dimes square crowd (think the coquettish track “Mean Girls”). As you can probably imagine, the discourse machine is whirring – so hard, in fact, that it’s entirely divided the Dazed team. So, here’s an official round table to digest it all.

Günseli Yalcinkaya, Features Editor: Listening to the lyrics for Charli’s “Mean Girls”, I’m imagining a writer’s room funded by Peter Thiel, full of Dimes Square trad caths reminiscing the glory days circa 2021. The internet moves at a fast pace, this taps back to a post-COVID moment in internet history that’s better off forgotten, not celebrated. That said, the internet discourse bleeds across all aspects of the album, the most obvious being the enlisting of it-girls like Julia Fox and Gabriette to cloutbomb Brat into public discourse. I like that, though – it feels like the sort of roll-out befitting of a mega-pop star in this day and age. And the album art is pure meme-bait, which I clearly love.

James Greig, Political Editor: I think Brat is a solid album, but I’m a little mystified by the way it’s being spoken about as a career-defining triumph – it‘s no How I’m Feeling Now, if you want my view. And while it’s unfair to judge a work of art based on its audience, some of it does seem to be geared towards the most annoying people on the internet: take “Mean Girls”, an ode to problematic coquettes in their mid-twenties who call men “daddy” and flirt with the iconography of Catholicism – pretty transgressive stuff! I like the song’s beat, but I find the lyrics excruciating (some of my colleagues have tried to claim that it’s supposed to be satirical, but if that’s the case, it’s not successful as satire). At moments like this, it’s as though Charli is arriving too late to an aesthetic trend of which she herself was an early pioneer. It’s a fun album which has moments of depth and poignancy but, unlike the best of her work, it doesn’t sound like the future.

Chester Mckee, Video Coordinator: She promised the album of the summer and in my eyes she served it on a plate with poppers and passion. The marketing behind this album really lived up to the bangers and it made me want to dance but also shoot myself, which is how I feel most days (and how I’m feeling now)! Whoever does not get this album clearly does not get banter, but I’m excited to see what’s next to come from the now lowercase xcx.

Elliot Hoste, Fashion Writer: With Brat, Charli has finally achieved the fully realised version of her XCX-persona: a strung-out, 365 party girl, but one who thinks about stuff a lot and has an insatiable diva complex. Most of this was achieved through the album’s marketing, which positioned itself as an off-the-cuff guerilla campaign of dive-bar drop-ins and random block parties, but was, by Charli’s own admission, meticulously planned. Because of this, the campaign was a masterclass in performance pop art, and it’s no coincidence that she’s today’s most talked about star, and Brat will probably shoot to number one in the UK next week: Charli knows exactly who her fans are, and the campaign was practically AI-generated in its ability to exploit them.

As for the music, Brat probably sits in Charli’s top three albums, along with Pop 2 and how i’m feeling now, but in terms of a tool for pushing her career to the next level, it will be much more instrumental than those two records (because of the aforementioned campaign). Brat is a fun, dance-y, playful and sometimes innovative stream-of-consciousness, and though she’s still begging to be famous (that will never go away) she’s doing it in a way that at least sounds a lot better than Crash did. The best thing about Brat is that it’s finally allowed her to escape the tired descriptor of being tHe pOp sTaR oF ThE fuTuRe, and instead is firmly rooted in the here-and-now of the club. But, discourse be damned, Charli XCX’s music is always going to sound like a good time, and you absolutely cannot fault her on that.

Sol Pace-McCarrick, Editorial Intern: Brat follows Charli’s signature formula of innovative yet accessible on tracks like “360”, ‘I think about it all the time’ and ‘365’, but veers into the middle of the road on the vast majority that is sandwiched in-between. Production on “Von Dutch”, “Talk talk” and “Mean Girls” is so early-2010s UK pop-dance cheese that Tinchy Stryder and Pixie Lott might just pop out at any moment, and lyrics read like they were AI-generated from a Regina George prompt. Maybe that’s the point, but it’s not that interesting IMO.

Habi Diallo, Commercial Writer: It is not lost on me that I more than likely fit into one of the demographics the Brat marketing was intended for – chronically online girls in their early/mid-twenties who follow Blizzy McGuire and swing from wallowing in self-pity to using going out as a means of easing a God complex – but I’m not mad about it! I think it’s a well-constructed dance-pop project that feels intentional and quite clever. 

The Easyfun-produced song “Sympathy is a knife” is how I see Charli at her best – messy, vulnerable and battling her ego in a matter-of-fact type of way on a beat that is completely removed from the song’s theme. Similarly “Rewind”, produced by A.G. Cook, uses a similar formula of glitchy hyperpop with very simple yet undeniably relatable lyrics. The world has enough sad songs with mellow strings, tell me about your lack of self-esteem on a song I can dance to please and thank you. Some people seem to find it cringe, whereas I find the satire to be apt and honestly – it makes sense to me. To me, her iykyk approach to BRAT has made it one of her top three albums. If you disagree, maybe you just don’t get it.

Emma Davidson, Fashion Features Director: There’s a lot of chat up and down the timeline about how Charli was the billed as ‘the future sound of music’ and BRAT… Kind of sounds like a lot of stuff out there at the moment? But honestly, why would she desert the sound she truly helped pioneer and lean into something new when she does it so fucking well – BRAT is about perfecting what she’s already built, and, in my humble opinion, blowing all the pretenders to her throne out of the water. That said, on this album, Charli’s typically razor-sharp edges feel a bit sanded down, and on a couple of the bangers, like lead track “Von Dutch” and “B2B”, there’s something that falls short – there’s something to be said for restraint and knowing when to stop; but to me, on an album billed as a future rave classic, she could have gone a bit harder. As usual, though, it’s the bittersweet, sometimes excruciating, truly perfect pop tracks where she gets vulnerable that cement her status as one of the best to ever do it: “Sympathy is a knife” and “Talk talk” might not be particularly transgressive, but she’s kind of saying what we’re all thinking.