Charli XCX, who wrote pop’s golden era then crashed it with BRAT

The most remarkable thing about BRAT is how little Charli XCX seemed surprised by it. The album that became a presidential campaign backdrop, a dictionary entry, and the defining cultural artifact of an entire summer was not an accident — it was the latest step in a carefully maintained refusal to make music anyone could predict. What was surprising was the scale: three Grammy Awards, five Brit Awards, and a specific shade of lime green becoming a shorthand for a whole way of being young. By the time the dust settled, she had already started recording something entirely different.

Charlotte Emma Aitchison was born in Cambridge and grew up in Start Hill, Essex, the daughter of a Scottish father and a Gujarati Indian mother. She started writing songs at 14, persuaded her parents to loan her money for a first album, and by 16 was performing at illegal warehouse raves in East London — her parents occasionally in the crowd. She enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, then left during her second year when the music became more pressing. Asylum Records signed her at 18, an arrangement that established a deal without quite knowing what to do with what she was making.

The songwriting came first. “I Love It,” co-written for Icona Pop in 2012, reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the UK singles chart. “Fancy,” co-written for Iggy Azalea in 2014, went to number one in the US. “Boom Clap,” written for The Fault in Our Stars soundtrack, reached the top ten in seven countries. For several years she was the most commercially successful songwriter nobody discussed on their own terms.

Her solo albums tracked a different logic. True Romance (2013) was critically adored and commercially modest — a debut closer in spirit to the Cocteau Twins than to the chart pop she was topping for other artists. Sucker (2014) sharpened the sound toward the mainstream without fully reaching it. The 2017 mixtapes Number 1 Angel and Pop 2 arrived at something else entirely: densely collaborative, referencing club music and hyperpop before hyperpop had a commonly understood name, they reshaped the sonic vocabulary of the genre a full five years before critics had language for what they had done. Charli (2019) brought those threads into a proper album structure; How I’m Feeling Now (2020), recorded and publicly livestreamed during six weeks of COVID lockdown, was a record about the anxiety of visibility made in the most exposed manner possible.

Crash (2022) made a different wager: a gleaming, deliberately commercial pop record that reached number one in the UK, Australia, and Ireland. It felt like a thesis statement delivered with a smirk.

The thesis became moot almost immediately. BRAT arrived in June 2024 as a record about ambition and its costs, about the particular exhaustion of caring about fame while knowing exactly what that caring reveals. It drew from hyperpop, dance, and rave; its lyrics were more confessional than anything in her catalog. Metacritic rated it the highest album of the year. When Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign adopted its lime-green visual aesthetic and Aitchison amplified it on social media, the album briefly became a backdrop for a presidential race. “Brat” entered the Collins English Dictionary as word of the year for 2024. The 2025 Grammy ceremony followed with three awards: Best Dance/Electronic Album, Best Dance Pop Recording for “Von Dutch,” and Best Recording Package. The Brit Awards added five more, including Artist of the Year and Album of the Year.

The critical embrace of BRAT involved a kind of institutional acknowledgment. For most of a decade, Charli XCX’s experimental solo work had received exactly the praise that precedes commercial failure: think-pieces, “ahead of its time” framings, the lists of artists she had influenced without their careers being tied to hers. Number 1 Angel and Pop 2 were reshaping pop’s sonic vocabulary; they were also selling modestly. Whether BRAT belongs in the Best Dance/Electronic Album category is a reasonable question — the record is doing something more specific than that designation suggests — but the recognition itself represents the industry finally arriving at a conversation she had been having for twelve years.

Music, Fashion, Film, her seventh studio album, is due July 24, 2026, through Atlantic Records. Produced primarily with A. G. Cook and Finn Keane — sessions began in October 2025 — it is a deliberate departure: guitar-based, more linear, with eleven tracks running thirty minutes. The cover is a black-and-white photograph of John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese. Singles “Rock Music,” “SS26,” and “Wink Wink” point toward post-punk and new wave rather than the electronic production that defined BRAT. The North American arena tour runs from September through October 2026, with a portion of charity ticket proceeds going to the Transgender Law Center.

She married George Daniel, drummer and co-producer of The 1975, in a civil ceremony at Hackney Town Hall in July 2025, followed by a larger celebration in Sicily.

A career built on refusing the expected move does not stop to consolidate its achievements. Music, Fashion, Film is not a correction or an apology for BRAT. It is simply the next refusal.