With the title of her deluxe album, Brat and it’s the Same But There’s Three More Songs So It’s Not, Charli xcx scorned the dull and exploitative rereleases and deluxes and set a high expectation for Brat and its Completely Different but Also Still Brat. The electropop remix album, released on the 11th of October, met the expectation. The record balances on the axis of pleasure and pain, melancholy and irreverence, enhancing these themes through mindful collaborations with artists such as Caroline Polachek and Lorde.
The album transforms most of the original tracks with mindful features of artists such as The 1975, and Lorde. When these collaborations work, they sharpen the focuses of xcx’s songs. The lyricism of “I Might Say Something Stupid featuring The 1975 & Jon Hopkins” is imbued with further emotionality when sung as a duet, the contrast between Healy’s less filtered vocals with xcx’s iconic computerized drone mirrors the conflict of feeling misunderstood, feeling alienated and different. The shattering impact of xcx’s collaboration with Lorde on the “Girl, So Confusing” remix left thousands of ex-tumblr users shivering at the line “You know I ride for you, Charli”.
There are moments where the additional voices don’t lend themselves to xcx’s narrative, much of which focuses on the isolation of fame and the ways in which it complicates her personal struggles. In “I Think About It All The Time”, xcx’s internal monologue about ambition and her fears of the biological clock are more compelling expressed with her singular voice, because it communicates a weight often unevenly shouldered in heterosexual relationships, and the pressure placed upon women to choose between motherhood and success.
Beyond the tender moments of the record, the collaborations with Troye Sivan, Billie Eilish, and Addison Rae, create an atmosphere so infectiously energetic that it is almost impossible to listen without dancing. The seamless integration of these future club classics into a record that is, at its core, about the gendered struggles of an immensely successful woman, is ingenious. The record becomes a microcosm of the struggle it depicts, capturing perfectly the dynamic between joy and triumph, and guilt and sadness.
Brat and its Completely Different but Also Still Brat is a very clever study of Brat’s success, the subsequent impact on its creator, and simultaneously a record that we will all dance to for many years to come.
Illustration by Meria Bradley
