This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The only thing that could have made this a bigger year for Charli XCX would have been a different result in the presidential election. Back when Kamala Harris was first announced as the Democratic candidate, Charli — real name Charlotte Gemma Aitchison — was one of the first celebrities to throw her weight behind the Harris campaign by tweeting “kamala IS brat”.

Brat is the name of Charli’s all-conquering 2024 album, but it’s more than that. Brat is a meme: a fuzzy, deliberately ugly sans serif typeface on an aggressively lurid green background. It’s an attitude: “I’m a brat when I’m bumpin’ that,” sings Charli on the song “365”, which closes out the album, suggesting a whole sexy, dirty, druggy world of bolshy hedonism.

What all that has to do with being leader of the free world is hard to say, but it’s a measure of Charli’s cultural heft that her intervention seemed, at the time, important. Summer 2024 was labelled “brat summer”, and if Charli didn’t rule the world herself, it seemed like she at least had the power to decide who would. Well, it didn’t matter in the end. But it matters that it felt like it mattered.

At 32, Charli counts as a pop veteran. She released her first music in 2008, and my fandom started ten years ago with the song “Boom Clap” (a song which, fittingly, is an anthem to the apocalyptic bliss of falling in love). Nonetheless, Brat had the feeling of an overnight success. As soon as you’d heard of it, it was suddenly everywhere.

That was as Charli intended. The Brat campaign began almost a year ahead of release with a carefully orchestrated tease designed to turn Charli’s superfans (nicknamed “angels”) into ambassadors for the project. This reverses the trend towards high-impact, no-notice overnight album drops as pioneered by Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, and it accomplished two things.

First, it engineered hunger for Brat. Second, it said that Charli was doing things differently. Though Taylor and Bey make canny use of the personal in their work, they maintain an imperial aloofness. Even their risks are calculated — when Taylor endorsed Harris, it was with a carefully weighed statement, not a throwaway three-word post. Brat felt messier. More intimate, in a sweaty, sticky way.

The first single from Brat was “von Dutch”, a headbutt of a song in celebration of a clothing brand that was (until very recently) fatally associated with the trash values of Y2K. Back in the noughties, you’d find a Von Dutch trucker cap on the head of every proto-influencer in Hollywood. And then, when those personalities fell out of favour, so did the label.

For Charli, reclaiming the brand went hand-in-hand with reclaiming a version of the past. In interviews, she’s talked about this as going back to the “Paris Hilton days”, when fame seemed like it could actually be fun, and a public — or indeed private — misstep didn’t carry the risk of terminal cancellation. It’s an appealing vision: I bought a Von Dutch sweatshirt in August and have had both it and Brat on pretty constantly ever since.

You can get a good idea of what Charli was reacting against by looking at the example of Lizzo. Once an invective-spitting rapper, Lizzo reinvented herself as an all-genders-inclusive, body-positive good-times anthem merchant after 2016. But in 2023 (coincidentally, around the time Charli was fomenting the Brat album), Lizzo hit the skids: she was accused by some of her back-up dancers of arrogance, unkindness and (worst of all) fat-shaming.

Lizzo denies the allegations, but the reason they were so specifically damaging to her is that she had pinned her public image to the flag of #bekind. A rapper doesn’t have to be a moral exemplar. An activist does, and whilst there was a market for the popstar-as-resistance-figure during the years of Trump mark 1 and the covid-hothoused “reckoning”, it’s a role that inevitably becomes stifling.

Brat is a less careful kind of pop than we’ve had for the last few years, because it’s music for people who are tired of being careful. That’s why the “brat” meme rampaged through the summer into the autumn, when Charli released a remix album.

It’s why, when there was a brief online attempt to generate outrage about the Billie Eilish remix of the toweringly explicit song “Guess”, there were very few takers. Was the line “Charli likes boys but she knows I’d hit it” predatory? Read the room: no one wants to play confected offence in 2024.

And this is also why “kamala IS brat” was never more than wishful thinking. In a tough campaign for the Democrats, Harris was always the wrong candidate: too stiff, too chilly, and too associated with the excesses of liberal newspeak, especially on gender. None of this is very brat.

One of the most successful attack ads against Harris was the spot that went: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” The electorate’s exhaustion with opaque, prissy rules was an easy button for the Republicans to punch.

“Brat” is definitely not a conservative concept. (One of the loveliest songs on the album is “So I”, a tribute to the trans producer and songwriter Sophie who died in 2021.) But that just makes it all the more necessary for the political left to listen when the public says it’s bored of being chided. Brat was the album of the year, and brat is the vibe of the future.