If you are up-to-date with the whole 'Brat Summer' thing, then get ready to move on, because Charli XCX is entering a 'post-Brat' era. We don't know what it is yet, but it ain't Brat. It's an ex-Brat. Brat has left the building.
If you are unfamiliar with the term 'Brat Summer', then where have you been since, well, last summer? Likely just getting on with your life, and certainly not up to speed with Charli XCX's last album, Brat, which, with its mix of underground dance and overground pop, gave rise to the whole ethos.
Charli XCX's huge album Brat was released last summer and the distinctive lime green covered recording was huge pretty much everywhere, earning the singer a top 3 in the US and number ones in many other countries and end-of-year charts.
But it wasn't so much the success of the album that gave us the Brat Summer culture and craze; that was about the album's themes, lyrics, lifestyle and interviews and tweets in which she and her fans embraced the new Brat summer vibe of cheap, and trashy versus sophisticated and, well, trashy. And all with a lime green hue.
Charli herself says of Brat, "You’re just that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown but kind of parties through it. Is very honest, very blunt."
We obviously relate to all of that, but now that you're up to speed with us, you might as well forget everything we've just taught you because Brat Summer is becoming an ex-Brat, and not even a Brat-Fall/Autumn.
Brat producers A. G. Cook, Finn Keane, and George Daniel were interviewed at Grammy.com, after the album won a hat-trick of Grammys for Best Dance/Electronic Album, Best Recording Package, and Best Pop/Dance Recording for the track Von Dutch (above). They claim there's a new XCX era on the way. Could it be XCXI?
"I was really thinking about this idea of something both feeling very slick and shiny, but also completely messy and chaotic," Keane said, when asked to describe 'Brat' in terms of its sound. "What communicates that is very simple and minimal sound design. It has a kind of unfinished feeling to it, but also a boldness and a slickness to it, a clarity to it. And I think that tension of having both those things at once really summed up the spirit of the album."
"There's a spectrum of sounds or ideas that a song had to tick off," Daniel added, "whether it's the extreme end of hard-hitting or the super intimate end of things."
When asked about new XCX material, the producers revealed that it will likely be very different to Brat.
"Chatting to Charli now," Keane revealed, "there is a desire in her to do the complete opposite thing again, which is very in keeping with her ethos. Some of the conversations we're having and music we've been playing around with the last couple of months have been completely the opposite.
"I love that spirit. It's the iconoclastic impulse to rebuild something completely different, to show that you actually could do this other thing, this whole other side of your artistry.
"It's been really funny," he concluded, "in the months after finishing the remix album, any other musical discussion that has taken place has been kind of anti-Brat. I doubt that'll stick, but that's been a really interesting thing to observe and makes me very optimistic and excited about [what's next]."
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