Dance

“The reason I love electronic music and clubs and DJs so much is that everything is endless,” ­Charli xcx told Billboard in her July cover story. Fittingly, the veteran pop artist got her start in London’s rave scene over a decade ago and, across five albums, developed a faithful cult following. But it was her sixth album, brat, and its yearlong rollout, that shifted perception — and expanded her fandom.
Beginning with her record-breaking Boiler Room warehouse set in February, Charli let demand slowly build before the June release of brat, which was met with critical acclaim and became her highest-charting title on the Billboard 200, entering at No. 3 and collecting 82,000 equivalent album units in its first week, according to Luminate. In the following months, the internet deemed the season “Brat Summer” as Charli became even more omnipresent and brat started to shape-shift.

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Soon after brat’s release, Charli dropped a surprise remix of standout song “Girl, so confusing” featuring its subject: Lorde. The drop hinted at more to come, and in August the “Guess” remix featuring Billie Eilish arrived — and soon became the highest-charting song from brat, peaking at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. Brat Summer soon turned into Brat Fall with the September kickoff of her co-headlining Sweat Tour with Troye Sivan, during which Charli released a full-fledged remix album titled Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat.

Every song was reimagined and featured at least one special guest, including Robyn and Yung Lean (“360”), Ariana Grande (“Sympathy Is a Knife”), Bon Iver (“I Think About It All the Time”) and Sivan on “Talk Talk,” which closed each night of their tour. To celebrate the release of the remix album, a larger-than-life “sonic sculpture” was unveiled at New York’s open-air Storm King Art Center, juxtaposing its lime green walls against the browning colors of the surrounding grass and trees.

By November, brat earned Charli seven Grammy nominations — including for album and record of the year (“360”) — and she ended the month by pulling double duty as host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live. She closed the year by announcing a few 2025 solo arena dates, as well as a headlining set at Primavera Sound in Barcelona and a main-stage booking at Coachella. The word “brat” was even named word of the year by the Collins English Dictionary.

As for what’s still ahead, her management team reveals that all of 2025 is already planned out. For an artist like Charli, who has “always operated three steps ahead,” as Twiggy Rowley, a member of her management team, previously told Billboard, the blueprints for Brat Winter and Brat Spring have indeed been laid — and will lead right back to where it all began, with no end in sight. Just as Charli always wanted.

And yet, as Charli said while speaking to the audience at a May screening of her “360” music video, “It’s hard being ahead.” Her longtime creative director, Imogene Strauss, agrees, telling Billboard in June: “I think this is very true. Doing things first almost never means you’re going to be the biggest or most famous. Being the reference means you have to make choices that go against the status quo.”

Still, Charli and her team have managed to sustain the momentum surrounding brat for months — and make it look easy. And while her previous output has earned critical love, she and her team’s lockstep moves in 2024 have actually helped her become both one of the biggest and most famous pop stars of the year.

“Going into this album, Charli had written a 20-page manifesto for the core team,” recalls Brandon Davis, executive vp/co-head of pop A&R at Atlantic. “So much of what you saw throughout the campaign was conceptualized many months prior by her. She’s a genius. The look, the feel, the sound, the art, the fashion — it was all there and all Charli.”

Because of that precision, her team was able to build “key campaign moments” based on her vision. “Where things got a bit spontaneous,” Davis continues, “was what happened next.”

He cites the “brat wall” as the best example of inspiring “massive cultural moments” that the team then had the challenge of amplifying. Over the summer, a wall in Brooklyn was painted brat green and communicated different messages and updates about the album, all of which were written and broadcast live for fans gathering in person and watching on social media. Soon enough, cities around the world from San Francisco to Brisbane, Australia, enacted walls of their own.

Davis also mentions the “brat generator,” an online tool that lets users customize their own brat album cover-inspired images, as helping boost the album’s cultural cachet. Once the team realized how widely the tool was being used, they mobilized to create multiple versions of the generator for each version of brat and, eventually, for the Sweat Tour as well.

As expected, the tour had brattiness coursing through it, with Strauss previously telling Billboard it was “an interesting morphing, shifting thing” because of how the album itself evolved throughout the trek. The list of potential surprise guests grew, too: At Madison Square Garden, Lorde joined Charli for their “Girl, so confusing” remix, and at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum, Kesha performed her version of “Spring breakers” (off the deluxe Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not), which arrived as a surprise release days after Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat.

“So much of this rollout was planned, but sometimes it was not,” Charli previously told Billboard, speaking of her “Girl, so confusing” remix with Lorde, which took just three days to arrange. As Davis reveals, “There was a moment where we weren’t even sure if the song would make it out on all [digital service providers] in time.”

Charli’s management team, led by Brandon Creed with Rowley and Sam Pringle, say the brat remixes are a perfect example of how quickly she moved following the release of the original album. While Charli always planned on releasing a remix set, no one anticipated how much momentum her collaboration with Lorde, which charted at No. 63 on the Hot 100, would inject into the campaign. And ever since, Charli has kept illustrating how being nimble is crucial to the “endless” release cycle she always wanted.

“It was a total balancing act of strategy and real-time decisions,” Charli’s management team shared in a joint statement to Billboard. “The entire brat campaign exemplifies perfectly when an artist and their team are locked in and able to amplify, magnify and pivot with all decisions.”

“I think the key fundamental was to always be watching, always be nimble and always stay close to Charli,” Davis adds. “She knows herself, and her fans, best.”

As for what will come next, that’s for Charli to know and fans to find out. How very brat.

This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.