Radical Poptimism
A brilliant new album from Charli XCX reframes pop's tabloid obsessions and self-referentiality. Plus: Mixed results from Dua Lipa and Justin Timberlake.
Charli XCX - Brat
With “Sympathy is a knife”— one of several standouts from an exhilarating new album called Brat— Charli XCX has written the year’s best song about Taylor Swift. Given that Swift herself has released more than 30 such songs in recent weeks, this is no small feat.
To sense Swift’s presence in the song— to understand that she is at once a peripheral character and a larger-than-life figure in Charli’s life (who among us?)— it’s necessary to be up-to-speed on the romantic histories of both singers. Swift is never mentioned by name in the song, and there is no exposition to explain how she and Charli are connected. Instead, Charli alludes to a woman who triggers acute feelings of insecurity, fretting about the possibility of running into this unnamed nemesis backstage at her boyfriend’s show— a worry that feels far more plausible if you know that Charli is engaged to the drummer from The 1975, and that Swift briefly dated the lead singer from the same band.
Throughout Brat, Charli embeds tabloid lore in a manner that— at the risk of exacerbating her insecurities— can only be described as Swiftian. And yet, there are some critical distinctions in the way Charli uses her allusions and Easter eggs to create metanarrative and to comment on her own persona.
These distinctions largely come down to the nature of Charlis’ relationship with her audience. While Swift increasingly comes across as a puzzlemaster, challenging her faithful fans to extract hidden meaning from a set of increasingly-diabolical clues, Charli’s reference points are employed in a conversational style— she hints at a Taylor Swift beef not to name-drop but to help us feel like she’s airing her real feelings with us, in all their unfiltered specificity. Not for nothing does Charli frequently invoke friends and collaborators— boyfriend George, producers SOPHIE and A.G. Cook— on a first-name basis, salting her album with informal, colloquial flare. She’s not writing MCU-style backstories; rather, she’s writing in the same voice and style she might use to text with a friend.
That’s not exactly to say that Charli pretends to be just like the rest of us. What gives Brat such transgressive power is how it feels like Charli is saying all the things you’re not supposed to say about being a famous person— but in sparing no detail, neither about her vulnerabilities nor her vanity, she comes across like a normal, only slightly-maladjusted human.
There are big gestures of chest-thumping ego, as in the irresistible “Club classics”— a song allegedly inspired by Charli hearing a Dua Lipa song light up the dance floor and wondering why it couldn’t be one of her own hits. In what almost feels like the mutant offspring of a self-empowerment anthem, Charli sings about wanting to get caught up in one of her own iconic bangers, for her work to be recognized and celebrated in a public way. Is this a full pop star heel turn— or is it frankly a more relatable sentiment than many of us would care to admit?
Brat seesaws between moments of bravado and moments of self-doubt, demonstrating just how thin the line between them can be. In “So I,” she chronicles her critically-revered team-ups with the late producer SOPHIE— but also admits to how intimidating it is being friends with someone of such outsized talent. In “Rewind,” she acknowledges that age and success have only made her more self-critical. Elsewhere, she admits to being “famous, but not quite”— a self-described “cult classic,” not a celebrity so much as a “reference point” for discerning pop fans. “Mean girls” dismisses Lana Del Ray fans with the same energy Swift summoned when she sighed about the “indie records much cooler than mine.”
In “I might say something stupid”— the album’s most depressive moment— Charli muses bout having “one foot in a normal life.” It’s precisely because she is so candid both about existing on the periphery of fame and feeling like she’s still a regular person that the twisted emotions of Brat feel so real: She evades the phoniness of pretending like she’s just like the rest of us, but also avoids talking down to us from a place of imperious remove. The sentiment on “I think about it all the time”— about weighing career ambition with the desire for motherhood— rings truer because of its grounding in the strange particulars of Charli’s life.
For all its interiority, Brat’s defining sonic characteristic is its sheer, unabashed sense of fun. It takes confidence to title a song “Club classics,” and what’s remarkable about Charli’s work with producer A.G. Cook is that not only does the song live up to its name— it’s not even the most indelible thing here. The entire album is loaded with club classics in the making, from the sleek Euro pop of “Talk talk” to the made-for-TikTok meme machine “Von dutch.”
Even while writing some of the smartest, brainiest pop songs in recent memory, Charli seems primarily focused on getting the genre back into the club. With its fleet pacing and 41-minute runtime, Brat is defiantly out-of-step with the other tentpole pop opuses of 2024— certainly with Swift’s insouciant synth-pop, and with Beyoncé’s epoch-defining ambition. The closest antecedent might be Robyn’s Body Talk— but where Robyn seemed to take pride in offering a thinking-person’s alternative to the pop of her era, Charli seems more interested in meeting listeners where they are, providing the summer jams and dancefloor anthems that her peers have failed to deliver.
For all the realness of Charli’s lyrics, the music itself revels in artifice, an aesthetic mash-up that creates tantalizing friction. In “I might say something stupid,” the most confessional and vulnerable moment on the album, Charli’s voice is warped and garbled by a generous dose of AutoTune. Listeners who desire an acoustic guitar or some other tried-and-true signifier of authenticity will mostly be disappointed, though there is a jazzy piano breakdown in "Mean girls. The sound of the record is defined by thrumming low-end, steely beats, and agreeably trashy synth effects. There are parts of “Girl, so confusing” where it seems like the melody is being carried almost entirely by a dissonant hum, an abrasive effect that’s perfectly-matched to Charli’s tart lyrics.
Brat opens with a cheerful song called “360,” which finds the singer posing a simple question: “When you’re in the mirror, do you like what you see?” She spends the remainder of the album developing a surprisingly complicated answer. And yet, by the time the album closes with “365,” Charli has made up her brave face again, going back to being an unrelenting “party girl.” But with Brat, Charli’s found a way to have it both ways, unironically playing the party girl while also dropping her mask— and in doing so, she’s made one of the great pop albums of the era.
My rating: 8.5 out of 10
Dua Lipa - Radical Optimism
Although Charli XCX and Dua Lipa share the same day job, they approach the business of pop stardom from completely different vantage points. Where Charli leverages backstory, metanarrative, and extra-musical buzz to superlative effect, Lipa is far more retiring— as Laura Snapes writes in Pitchfork, she “stridently resists personal disclosure in her work.”
It’s a choice that has born diminishing results, at least commercially: While the winsome Future Nostalgia became a pandemic-era hit based on kinetic energy alone, the follow-up Radical Optimism has failed to gain traction. Without high-wattage pop star personality to fuel its ascent, the album has been assessed on the merits of songcraft alone— and in many ways, what Lipa is doing here is simply out of fashion.
There is nothing on the album that feels au courant the way that Brat does— nothing conversant with contemporary pop trends, nothing that seems like it could legitimately fuel TikTok phenomena. Instead, Lipa channels disco-pop spirits as wide-ranging as ABBA and Ray of Light-era Madonna, creating a suite of glistening mid-tempo tunes with clean production and big vocal hooks. Like Brat, this is an album that could ostensibly send listeners to the dancefloor— only here, the dancing is considerably more casual, less sweaty.
But if Radical Optimism isn’t as confrontational as Brat— nor quite as instantly absorbing as Future Nostalgia was— it is amply pleasurable, a classic case of a pop “grower." Production from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker ensures a sonorous, richly-textured sound— it sounds expensive in the way that Beyoncé albums often sound expensive, a luxury product amidst flimsy imitators. At 36 minutes, the album doesn’t overstay its welcome. And what Lipa lacks in celebrity charisma she makes up for with the power of her voice.
Just because the album lacks metanarrative doesn’t mean it lacks point of view. Radical Optimism takes the premise in its title seriously— though populated primarily with breakup songs, the album is less focused on heartache, more focused on finding opportunities for growth and self-discovery. While it begins with a song called “End of an Era,” there’s a clear sense that Lipa is singing about the dawn of something new, a chance to use romantic dissolution as a means of reflection and maturity.
A late-album highlight called “Maria” offers gratitude for her current partner’s ex-lover, thanking her for whatever she did to make him a more rounded human being. It’s followed by “Happy for You,” where Lipa happens upon a photo of an ex holding tight to his new lover, expressing affection that sounds sincere— even praiseworthy. It’s a mature shading to an album that manages to be light and frothy while still bearing surprising emotional weight.
My rating: 7 out of 10.
Justin Timberlake - Everything I Thought I Was
If ever there was a pop singer who might benefit from more rigorously addressing his personal life and public persona, surely it’s Justin Timberlake— the aging lothario and millennial nostalgia machine whose fall from grace began long before the release of his new album, Everything I Thought I Was, and has continued well after.
Once a dependably eager people-pleaser, frequent SNL host, and Jimmy Fallon foil, Timberlake has seen his brand collapse thanks to renewed scrutiny over past infractions, many of them involving imbalanced power dynamics that benefited Timberlake but led to the ruin of the women in his life— think Janet Jackson, Britney Spears. A recent DIY arrest and widely-memed mugshot brought Timberlake’s plight into stark relief, demonstrating how the Internet was primed and ready to make hay over his comeuppance.
Both ethically and creatively, a note of contrition would seem in order— some acknowledgement of mistakes made, lessons learned, amends offered. But such humility feels anathema to Timberlake, whose entire personality is mapped onto his seemingly sincere belief in his own endless charm. The resulting album feels like a prolonged attempt to shift the conversation, blowing past any sense of interiority in favor of sweaty, strained charisma.
The opening song, “Memphis”— named for Timberlake’s hometown— feints toward autobiography, but quickly collapses into blunt profanities and shockingly bland aphorisms. “If I don’t wake up in heaven, it was one hell of a ride,” he intones, defiantly. Could this truly be the extent of the wisdom he’s accrued from this season of humbling?
The answer is seemingly yes, as the remainder of this 77-minute (!!) album pivots away from introspection completely, instead returning to Timberlake’s favorite themes— how much he loves to dance, how much he loves to have sex, and how good he is at both. Always an appallingly bad lyricist, Timberlake barely even tries to be a smooth talker here, instead framing his come-ons as clumsily as can be. In one take-off on the old “if these walls could talk” adage, he wishes he could ask the room itself for a tally of just how many times he and his paramour have made love. The answer, of course, is “infinity.” Shockingly, this song is called “Infinity Sex,” and more shockingly still, Timberlake actually says these two words out loud.
Musically, Everything I Thought I Was sticks to the once-fashionable dance-pop that made Timberlake a star in the mid 2000s, often deliberately recalling sounds and motifs from his twin peaks of Justified and FutureSex/LoveSounds. It feels a bit like a latter-day Rolling Stones album, emulating past glories ably enough to satisfy nostalgic fans, but unlikely to supplant the greatest hits in Timberlake’s live revue. There are glimmers of Timberlake’s legitimate musical talent, particularly in the vocal arrangements, but the sheer length of the album, combined with the vacuity of its auteur, make it a slog.
A notable exception is “Paradise,” a perfectly pleasing reunion between Timberlake and his NSYNC crew. It’s both the best song on the album and a rather dire acknowledgement of where he is in his career— suggesting that, if he’s unwilling to do the work of real reflection and self-reckoning, perhaps the nostalgia circuit is his best bet after all.
My rating: 2.5 out of 10.