Chart Rewind: In 2014, Charli XCX Thundered to No. 1 With ‘Boom Clap’
Written by djfrosty on September 13, 2024
A decade before Brat summer, Charli XCX roared to No. 1 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart with “Boom Clap.”
The song began a three-week reign on the list dated Sept. 13, 2014, and marked her first No. 1 on her own and second overall. She first led as featured on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” for three weeks beginning that June.
Powered by their explosive choruses, the songs became Charli XCX’s second and third Pop Airplay top 10s, after Icona Pop’s fellow anthemic hit “I Love It,” on which she’s also featured, rose to No. 3 in June 2013.
On the multimetric Billboard Hot 100, “I Love It” hit No. 7; “Fancy” dominated for seven weeks – and earned top honors on the season-ending 2014 Songs of the Summer chart; and “Boom Clap” stormed to No. 8.
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Notably, “Boom Clap” marked the fourth consecutive Pop Airplay No. 1 by an artist in a first chart visit as a lead act, following three fellow enduring hits: Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me,” Magic!’s “Rude” and Nico & Vinz’s “Am I Wrong.”
“Discovering new artists is one of the many things that keeps radio great,” Tommy Chuck, senior vice president of programming for iHeartMedia’s Tampa and Sarasota, Fla., stations, told Billboard upon the chart coronation of “Boom Clap.”
New acts or not, “great songs win,” said Erik Bradley, Audacy brand manager. “And hits like ‘Rude’ and ‘Boom Clap’ are incredible songs.”
“Boom Clap” was released from Charli XCX’s album Sucker, which reached No. 28 on the Billboard 200 in January 2015. The song was also fueled by its synch in the hit film The Fault in Our Stars.
In 2016, the Cambridge, England-born artist hit the Hot 100’s top 10 as a co-writer of Selena Gomez’s “Same Old Love,” while in 2019, her co-write “Senorita,” recorded by Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello, spent a week at No. 1, marking Charli XCX’s second leader as a writer, after “Fancy.”
In 2022, Crash became Charli XCX’s first Billboard 200 top 10, peaking at No. 7. This June, Brat bounded in at its No. 3 best. The Atlantic Records release has yet to depart the chart’s top 15 and has earned 585,000 equivalent albums in the United States through Sept. 5, according to Luminate. (Meta moment, especially for this post: “I used to never think about Billboard/ But now, I’ve started thinking again, wondering about whether I think I deserve commercial success,” she muses on the set’s reflective track “Rewind.”)
Meanwhile, Brat single “360” becomes Charli XCX’s first Pop Airplay top 10 since “Boom Clap,” rising a spot to No. 10 on the Sept. 21-dated chart. In addition to notching her fourth top 10 on the tally, she scores the list’s highest new entry, as fellow Brat track “Apple” debuts at No. 36.
Looking back for Billboard’s July cover story, Charli XCX called Sucker “an attempt at what Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour was able to do much better. My vision wasn’t fully realized. I was 19 years old. Whilst I think a lot of the songs that I was doing then were good songs, I wouldn’t necessarily have listened to them if it was another artist releasing them. I think I knew that at the time, but I also think I knew that that was OK. At that time, I was writing for a lot of other people, and I wanted to be doing that. I knew I probably wouldn’t have been in those [writing rooms] had ‘Boom Clap’ and those songs not happened the way they happened.”