Charli XCX

Charli XCX has been rewriting the rules of mainstream pop for over a decade now, and the frustrating thing is that the mainstream keeps taking its time catching up to her. She arrived as a songwriter’s songwriter, quietly selling hooks to artists you knew while her own records were too weird, too sharp, and too interested in the outer edges of pop to get the radio support they deserved. Then “BRAT” happened.

The 2024 album turned Charli XCX from an acclaimed but niche figure into a genuine cultural force. Not just because of the music, though the music is excellent. But because the conversation around it became a kind of shorthand for a particular attitude, a certain refusal to perform palatability. “Brat summer” became a thing that people who had never listened to her were referencing, which is the strangest version of crossover success imaginable.

Charlotte Emma Aitchison was born in Cambridge in 1992, grew up in Essex, and was performing in London clubs as a teenager after being spotted by a manager at one of those shows. She signed to Asylum Records at 14 and spent years in a major label system trying to make her work fit into formats it was never designed for. She is blunt about this period in interviews. She made records she does not particularly want people to hear. She learned how the machine works by getting chewed up by it.

What saved her, career-wise, was her willingness to work sideways. Writing “I Love It” for Icona Pop, co-writing Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” appearing on “Fancy” herself and essentially stealing the video. These weren’t compromises. They were smart moves by someone who understood that visibility could be built from unusual angles.

Her albums, when she was allowed to make them the way she wanted, were always ahead of where pop was headed. “Sucker” in 2014 was a loud guitar-pop record. “Pop 2” in 2017, released as a mixtape, is still regarded by critics as one of the most prescient pop records of that decade. It drew from hyperpop, from PC Music aesthetics, from experimental club music, and it sounded like nothing being made at the scale of a major pop artist at the time.

She has always been interested in collaboration, not in the transactional sense of features as marketing tools, but in genuinely building creative relationships. Her work with SOPHIE, with A.G. Cook, with producers from the PC Music orbit, helped define a whole aesthetic direction in pop. When those collaborators came to wider prominence, the lines tracing back to Charli were visible if you knew where to look.

“Crash” in 2022 was deliberately commercial, a provocation in itself, an artist making the radio-friendly album as a kind of performance. It worked, commercially, and Charli seemed to enjoy the joke. Then “BRAT” arrived and she stopped making jokes about commercial viability and just made exactly the record she wanted to make. The result was the kind of success that feels earned rather than engineered.

She is now one of the most discussed pop artists in the world, which places her in an interesting position. The outsider status that defined the earlier part of her career is harder to claim. But the music still operates with the same refusal to simplify. Whatever she makes next will be its own thing. It always is.