"Let's work it out on the remix"
Reimagining her buzzy album Brat, Charli XCX deepens and broadens her ongoing monologue on insecure celebrity. It's one of the most surprising and rewarding releases of 2024.
Charli XCX - Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat
Turns out it’s not easy being a celebrity— or in the words of Charli XCX, “famous but not quite.” That’s how she described herself on Brat, the pungent pop opus that became one for 2024’s most seismic hits, not least for the British singer’s willingness to say all the things she’s not supposed to say about life in the public eye.
In a tone both candid and cheeky, the songs on Brat presented one-sided conversations about life as a self-appointed “cult classic”— a life that’s at once completely different and not so different from yours and mine. She opened up about calling the paparazzi on herself, longing to hear her own songs blaring at the club, and worrying about awkward run-ins with Taylor Swift. She conveyed self-assured bravado, then pivoted to raw anxieties about putting her foot in her mouth, about being an ungrateful friend, about running out of time to enjoy her career while also having a family.
As a reflection on the tension between public image and self-perception, Brat is practically in a league of its own— ironically enough, the closest thing it has to a reference point is Swift’s trenchant Reputation. Or at least that was the case before the release of Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, a song-by-song remix of the original album that finds Charli deepening and broadening her ongoing musical and thematic concerns. Here, she turns her monologues into dialogues, inviting a vibrant gang of conversation partners that’s big enough to include Bon Iver, Ariana Grande, and ambient instrumentalist Jon Hopkins.
It’s difficult to overstate the ambition of this project, which isn’t a minor update to the original so much as a full reimagining. Only a couple of songs settle for added guest verses— including an indispensable appearance from Lorde that makes the new version of “Girl, so confusing” feel definitive. Most use Charli’s originals as mere jumping-off points for brand new excursions: The tight and economical “Club classics” is stretched out into a dance music playground, while “I might say something stupid” is transformed from Autotuned angst into a minimalist New Age piece.
One of the things that makes Charli’s work feel so visionary is how she embraces the more-is-more, nothing-is-final ethos of the streaming era, but uses it for her own purposes. From the post-release tinkerings of Kanye West to the endless iterations of each new Swiftian era, many of today’s tent-pole pop releases seek to renegotiate what the album format really means. By releasing a full-fledged companion piece to Brat, Charli has cultivated her own extended musical universe, allowing her to work out her ideas in a context that’s controlled yet malleable.
That’s not the only evidence of Charli’s sharp formal and aesthetic instincts. Another thing that makes the remix project so compelling is how she deploys so many of her collaborators as though they are mixtape rappers, allowing them to drop in, spit some bars, and incorporate their own personalities as texture and flavoring. The new take on “360” foregrounds swaggering interplay between Robyn and SoundCloud pioneer Yung Lean turning it from an empowerment anthem into a full fledged posse cut. The “Sympathy is a knife” 2.0 allows Grande to air some of her own lamentations about people rooting for her to fail, in a verse that successfully wrings pathos from high-wattage tabloid celebrity.
By reinventing these songs so fully, Charli ensures that some things are lost and some things are gained— which is precisely why it’s helpful to hear these songs not as replacements for but commentaries on the original tracks. The new take on “Club classics” omits Charli’s confession about wanting to hear her own music playing in public, a striking sentiment that gave the original track extra power— but it does blow out Charli’s penchant for maximal, four-quadrant dancefloor bangers, chopping and altering her voice to create the dizzying effect of a funhouse.
The Brat aesthetic was always meant to be purposefully artificial, noisy, blunt— but the remix project creates more space for warmth and repose. Charli is barely heard at all on the spare, acoustic remake of “I might say something stupid,” a moment of Zen amidst the record’s emotional whiplash. Here, The 1975’s Matty Healy voices the song’s bruising self-doubt, as though it’s a universal secret we’re all dying to reveal. The spacious, minimal piano from Hopkins is a welcome additional to Brat’s aesthetic palette.
It’s not the only song that pushes the Brat-o-verse into surprising new directions, all thanks to Charli’s effective curation of collaborators. A winsome take on “Apple,” featuring The Japanese House, presents a soft-rock groove so effortless, it could pass for a Haim song. In “Mean girls,” Julian Casablancas doubles down on Brat’s indie sleaze revival.
Part of what made Brat so exciting in the first place was its unabashed sense of fun; in a year where so many big pop albums have presented as conceptual statements, Charli dressed up very smart songwriting as low-stakes, dancefloor-ready confections. The remix album ups the ante. Listen to Troye Sivan turn the interiority of “Talk talk” into something flamboyant, sexy, and proudly international, or to how Addison Rae brings ruthless self-assurance to “Von Dutch.”
These songs aren’t just marvels of musical imagination; they also provide Charli and her collaborators with opportunities to enrich the album’s themes. The original version of “Girl, so confusing” was widely assumed to be a Lorde diss— so of course it’s transformative when Lorde herself shows up on the remix, presenting a fiery, confessional verse that steers the song into empathy and compassion. It’s one of the most remarkable performances on any album released in 2024.
And Lorde isn’t the only one who digs deep. Brat was always an album of incredible candor and messy, complicated humanity, but the remixes find Charli becoming more vulnerable still. The new version of “So I”— the lone remix that doesn’t feature a guest vocalist— strips away the original’s mixed emotions, and instead offers a heartfelt, diaristic reflection on how Charli’s friendship with the late SOPHIE bloomed. It’s one of the album’s most arresting moments, and it’s followed by a masterclass in dance music production from Charli’s boon collaborator A.G. Cook. Just as compelling is Bon Iver’s remake of “I think about it all the time,” where a Bonnie Raitt sample echoes Charli’s frank musings on the impossible push-pull of family and career.
The emotional palette of the Brat era proudly careens between swaggering braggadocio and unvarnished self-doubt— relatable feelings that were rendered in vibrant color on the original album, and feel memorably oversaturated here. With these remixes, Charli XCX has taken an instant-classic album and turned it into a deeper, more expansive body of work— an ongoing conversation that continues to yield rich rewards.
My rating for Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat: 8.5 out of 10.
My rating for the broader Brat project: 9.0 out of 10.