Music

“Now I swear this green is just everywhere,” Charli xcx jokes. The British pop star is sitting in a crisp leather seat within a black Mercedes-Benz van, a few minutes into the long journey across London from her home to Wembley Arena. Tonight, Charli will be making a surprise appearance at her friend, collaborator and soon-to-be tourmate Troye Sivan’s late-June concert there — but right now, she’s focused on the neon green hue of both the tissue box across the seat from her and my laptop case. Outside, I spot a car of the same color passing by, then a man in a neon green construction vest. Has this color always been so prominent, or are we only just now noticing it?

Everything about Charli’s sixth studio album, brat, released June 7 to massive critical acclaim and commercial success, started with its title and its cover: the now ubiquitous lime green square with “brat” printed on it in slightly blurred Arial font. Scrolling through her old texts later, Charli searches for the exact day when she came up with the cover art. “OK, found it,” she says finally, leaning in to share. “On March 16, 2022, I texted my friends, ‘I think it should just be one word on the album cover… Maybe it should be called brat.’ ” When she started writing the album’s music about six months later in Mexico City, she used the title as a jumping-off point for the attitude and brazenness she wanted each song to embody.

Inspired by a 1990s neon rave flyer and the title credits to Gregg Araki’s 2007 comedy, Smiley Face, Charli, 31, calls the album art’s color “actually quite disgusting” and says she picked it because it “spark[s] a really interesting conversation about [desirability]… It had to be really unfriendly and uncool.” Its shocking shade (it’s Pantone 3570-C, by the way) and easily replicable format has spawned mass virality — even the LinkedIn business bros, far from her target audience, are heralding it as “genius marketing.”

It’s hard to overstate brat’s current chokehold on the culture at large. “Bestie got a parking ticket and it’s BRAT CODED,” one fan recently tweeted, along with a photo of a green-colored citation. Hangers, earrings, lice shampoo, T-shirts, laundry detergent, olive oil, traffic signs, some old lady, grocery store chain Publix — if any trace of that characteristic green is involved, it can, and will, be labeled “brat” and posted online. Major brands like Amazon, Duolingo, Google and Netflix have embraced the hype, making “brat” memes of their own. Vegan sausage company Field Roast even created ads with lime green packaging featuring the word “bratwurst” in Arial font.

It’s the type of craze any marketing guru would kill for — which is why it’s even more noteworthy that, according to Charli’s team, the brat-uration of the internet started naturally. In fact, Imogene Strauss, her longtime creative director, has a more old-fashioned explanation for the cover art: She and Charli felt it was “loud” enough to stand out in a record store.

“We did hundreds of versions of the cover,” Strauss explains. “We knew it was going to be green, but the conversations around the shade of green were weeks long… There’s so many versions that existed before the final. We analyzed every single element: where has this color been used before, what are its associations, who reacts to it and how.”

As it caught on, Charli’s team rushed to create a “brat generator” for fans to more easily make their own art inspired by the cover. When Charli followed up the hit album three days after its release with a deluxe version — brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not, featuring… well, three more songs — her team built a second generator to mimic its black-and-white cover art. When a brat wall mural in Brooklyn announced the deluxe set’s release one painted letter at a time, Charli livestreamed it. As her marketing and digital guru, Terry O’Connor, puts it, a “big focus” of the campaign was about “making and creating real-life, in-person moments” that can then be captured digitally, like the phenomenon of fans posting selfies in front of the wall.

And this is just the tip of the brat cultural iceberg. The 15-track, 41-minute album’s lyrics include several lines that have already infiltrated the internet lexicon: “I’m so Julia” (a reference to actress Julia Fox), “You gon’ jump if A. G. made it” (a nod to brat executive producer A. G. Cook), “Bumpin’ that” (a refrain on brat’s opening and closing tracks) and “Let’s work it out on the remix” (a line from Lorde’s “Girl, so confusing” remix). The song “Apple,” which Charli admits almost didn’t even make the album, has spawned a TikTok choreography craze. The posts about the record are mutating and evolving so fast that Atlantic Records A&R executive Brandon Davis says, “We joke that someone from the team always needs to be on night watch. Someone always needs to be awake, watching the internet, so we can just pop up and go.”

But the internet-fluent project, its party-ready music and its discourse-dominating rollout belie its deep emotional core, which grapples with ego, womanhood and relationships. On the stripped-back “I might say something stupid,” Charli admits insecurity: “Guess I’m the mess and play the role.” With the bombastic “Von dutch,” she embraces arrogance: “It’s OK to just admit you’re jealous of me.” Then, on the strobing “Girl, so confusing,” she questions friendships: “Sometimes I think you might hate me.” On the intimate “I think about it all the time,” she wrestles with complex life choices: “Should I stop my birth control?/’Cause my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all.” By the full-circle album closer, “365,” she’s ready to go out: “Should we do another key, should we do another line?”

Overly analytical therapy-speak has infiltrated pop music lyricism, but listeners have latched onto the sincerity of Charli’s direct and “conversational” club music. Modern discourse has fixated on the meanings of girlhood and womanhood, but brat has effectively stripped away the sugar coating, laying bare the jealousy, messiness and confusion inherent to many female relationships, even if it often goes unspoken.

“I didn’t want any metaphors — like, at all,” Charli says, interrupted by the van’s abrupt stop and the driver laying on the horn. “I wanted this record to feel like I was having a conversation with the listener in a true way. I could say that to you in the back of a cab on the way to a club. Like tonight? I want to dance with A. G.,” she says.

With that creative conviction, Charli hasn’t just made the album she always wanted to: She has scored the biggest success of her career. But as Twiggy Rowley, a member of Charli’s management team since 2014, puts it, brat’s impact is an “intangible groundswell” as much as it is a quantifiable achievement. “She’s always operated three steps ahead. The only change is that people are now catching on.”

“It’s weird because I’ve been here before,” Charli says, peering out the window as the London streets whip past. She’s reflecting on the commercial success of brat, which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, her highest position on the chart to date. “But last time, I was here in a very different way.”

About a decade ago, the Essex native born Charlotte Aitchison was poised to become the next big British pop star. After spending her teens cutting her teeth as a singer in the London rave scene, she signed with Atlantic/Asylum in the United Kingdom in 2009. In 2013, she hit No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 by way of her guest appearance on Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” and the following year, she topped the chart thanks to her feature on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.” Her own 2014 single, “Boom Clap,” propelled by its synch in the John Green teen drama The Fault in Our Stars, reached No. 8 on the Hot 100.

Known for her quick pen — she co-wrote hits for Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes (“Señorita”) and Selena Gomez (“Same Old Love”) — and signature smudged black liner and dark mane of unruly waves, Charli seemed destined to continue dominating the charts as both songwriter and artist. But she amassed cultural cachet as an artist far quicker than commercial successes. Charli’s Angels — her cultlike fandom primarily comprising queer kids and partiers (or queer kid partiers) — have lauded her as a pop innovator for years, one so cool that the mainstream just didn’t get it. Each successive album found her striking out in new sonic directions — what she now calls “pendulum swings”— from Sucker’s pop-rock to How I’m Feeling Now’s pandemic hyperpop to, most recently, 2022’s Crash, a pop princess concept album that she says is “what it would sound like if I sold out.”

While Charli maintained a somewhat steady stream of critical acclaim for her work during these years, sometimes even the critics did not understand. An infamous Pitchfork review panned her now widely celebrated Vroom Vroom EP — produced by one of Charli’s mentors, the pioneering late artist SOPHIE, and today considered a foundational text of the subgenre known as hyperpop — with a dismal 4.5 rating upon its February 2016 release. In 2019, the critic “publicly disavowed the nonsense I wrote about Vroom Vroom” in a tweet; when Pitchfork rescored several of its most controversial reviews in 2021, it bumped the EP to a 7.8.

Charli is used to this. At a screening for her high-concept “360” music video — featuring a veritable parade of “It” girls from Chloë Sevigny to Fox — at Brain Dead Studios theater in West Hollywood, she proclaimed to the crowd: “It’s hard being ahead, you know?” But despite her impact, Charli also tends to critique her past work. Reflecting on some of her early songs during our car ride, she calls them “just not very potent” versions of who she is as an artist; she considers 2014’s Sucker, for instance, “an attempt at what Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour was able to do much better.”

“My vision wasn’t fully realized,” Charli explains. “I made decisions that maybe were suggested to me but that I actually didn’t fully believe in. 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.”

Despite Crash being Charli’s open bid for mainstream approval, it turned out her “no compromise” record brat would be far more successful commercially. (Crash debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 and fell off the chart after three weeks.) “Now every single move is considered in depth. I think about every element of my artistry so in depth that I feel truly potent now,” she explains, fixing her hair — which, after a few years of sporting a bob or various wigs, is back to its natural waved look, albeit with waist-long extensions.

“This is the most unabashedly, unapologetically Charli yet,” says Good World founder Brandon Creed, another member of her management team. “It is a paradigm shift for her and, in some ways, for the industry. This is a high-charting album, but it’s not being led by just one hit single. There’s a number of songs going at once.”

Still, Charli says, “I don’t really do this for the charts,” quickly couching her dismissal with a half-hearted “no offense.” On the brat track “Rewind” she does admit to contemplating it sometimes, singing, “I never used to think about Billboard/But now, I’ve started thinking about/Wondering about whether I think I deserve commercial success.”

“That line is actually referencing ‘Speed Drive’ [from the Barbie soundtrack],” Charli explains. “I wrote the song in 30 minutes. I didn’t think anything of [“Speed Drive”]… I feel like [soundtrack executive producer Mark Ronson] asked me a little late in the game. He was like, ‘We need something for the driving scene. Do you want to do it?’ And I was like ‘Yeah, sure, whatever.’ ”

When “Speed Drive” became her biggest hit in years, climbing to No. 73 on the Hot 100, she was in the middle of writing brat. “I wrote ‘Rewind’ as a reference to the feeling of ‘Wait, now I’m having this big moment with “Speed Drive.” F–k, that feels so random.’ ” Unfortunately, she says that due to the song’s interpolations of The Teddy Bears’ “Cobrastyle” and Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” “there are now like 25 writers listed on it or something, which really sucks for us… though I don’t really make much money from publishing anyway.” (Billboard estimates that Charli earns between $500,000 and $900,000 in publishing royalties from her artist catalog annually, depending on the nature of her publishing deal. This estimate includes both her publishing for her artist catalog and the songs she has written for others.)

Charli appears satisfied, if ambivalent, about her chart debut inroads with brat, but some of her Angels took offense on her behalf, particularly with her No. 2 debut in the United Kingdom. The same week that brat dropped, Taylor Swift — the rumored subject of brat track “Sympathy is a knife” — surprised fans with two new variants of The Tortured Poets Department. Both were specifically locked for only residents of the United Kingdom, where many believed Charli had a shot at No. 1. The Angels decried Swift’s move, accusing her of “blocking” Charli. In response to those rumors, Creed simply tells Billboard: “We stayed on our course, and we’re thrilled with the results of the album.”

At the 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena, Charli’s van is ushered through a back entrance. As she’s led down a long, low-ceiling hallway and hurried into her designated green room, her stiletto-heeled boots clack loudly on the concrete floor.

The hallway opens into the empty arena, where lighting techs are busily building the LED displays that will backdrop Sivan’s show a few hours later. Again, brat green is seemingly everywhere, from employee uniforms to venue signage; as it happens, it’s the color of the arena’s branding.

During the show, Sivan brings out Charli to perform their 2018 duet, “1999.” This fall, they’ll co-headline the Sweat Tour of U.S. arenas. After being friends for much of their careers and sharing Creed as a manager, Charli says that it finally “made sense” for them to tour together due to the “dance-leaning” nature of brat and Sivan’s latest album, last fall’s Something To Give Each Other. Largely citing seating charts on Ticketmaster, some outlets have reported low ticket sales for the tour, which was announced in mid-April, several weeks before brat’s release. But Jenna Adler, Charli’s agent at CAA, calls the rumor “fake news.”

“That’s just clickbait. It’s crazy,” she says. “My conviction is so strong about how well this tour is doing because I have the numbers and the numbers don’t lie.” (Adler declined to provide sales figures.) Charli also has four U.K. arena dates lined up for late 2024.

Live performance has already been essential to brat’s rollout, starting with Charli’s immediately legendary Boiler Room DJ set in February, which broke the record for the highest number of RSVPs in the company’s history within hours of its announcement. Flanked by brat executive producer Cook; her fiancé and co-writer, The 1975’s George Daniel; and producer Easyfun, she played many of brat’s songs for the first time. But to keep fans on their toes, all the versions she played were remixes.

“The reason I love electronic music and clubs and DJs so much is that everything is endless. Everything can be repurposed, reimagined,” she says. “As a pop writer, I find that exciting. It was cool to use Boiler Room as a space to demonstrate that artists often make five different versions of a song and the song that is put out is not the only one.”

Playing with the idea of “inclusivity and exclusivity,” as she puts it, is a core theme of brat. “I like the marketing of pop music more than I am interested in actual pop music,” Charli says. “I think we’ve been living in this world now for a while where there’s this desire to appeal to the most people, to have the biggest smile and be the nicest person with the widest appeal. But desire is cultivated by being a little bit hard to reach, a little bit separate. That’s why people want to wait in a queue at f–king Supreme, you know what I mean?

“With brat, it was really interesting to just do things for the fan base and make that feel exclusive — but then once you’re in the club, it’s actually very inclusive,” she continues. “Actually, everyone can join the club. It’s just that everybody joins at slightly different times in slightly different ways — whether that be on my private Instagram posts, or the 400-person Boiler Room, or a random cinema screening of a new music video in L.A., or a text message from me.”

Around brat’s release, Charli followed up her Boiler Room success with a brief underplay tour that stopped in London, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Held in far more intimate rooms than her upcoming arena tour, each became the hottest ticket in town. The show at New York’s Brooklyn Paramount in particular turned into an in-person reunion of Charli’s cast of characters mentioned, featured or alluded to on brat. (She says the album’s frequent name-checking also embodies that inclusivity-and-exclusivity concept: When you learn that “so Julia” refers to Fox, for example, it unlocks some of the meaning of “360.”) Fox attended that night, along with Cook; Daniel; The 1975’s Matty Healy; his fiancée, Gabbriette Bechtel; and the subject of “Girl, so confusing”: Lorde.

Like many of brat’s songs, figuring out the subject of “Girl, so confusing” isn’t difficult — which is why Charli reached out to Lorde ahead of its release. “I had to go through the process of telling her that this song is about her and her being OK with that first,” Charli explains. “I was trying to meet up with her for almost a year, and we kept having this weird, like, we were [going to], then we wouldn’t. It spoke to the narrative of the song itself. In the end, it didn’t work out. Then the day before the record came out, I left her a voice note. [Lorde] replied straight away and was like, ‘Oh, my God, I had no idea you felt this way. I’m so sorry.’ And then was like, ‘You know, maybe I should be on a version of the song.’ I didn’t even ask her. She brought it up.

“So much of this rollout was planned, but sometimes it was not,” she continues. “Lorde’s remix of ‘Girl, so confusing’ is a perfect example. That wasn’t planned. It took three days total.”

Within a few days, Lorde cut her verse. She sent it off to Charli and then headed out to attend the Brooklyn Paramount show. Lorde tells Billboard her first reaction to the song was a “two-part thing of both deep empathy for my friend and this feeling of ‘Man, I’ve been misunderstood, and I really want to make it right.’ ”

“It’s funny,” Charli says. “When I was listening to [Lorde’s] verse for the first time, I was backstage at the show. My hair stylist also does her hair. He had also just done her hair for the show, too, so he was just with her, and then he came to me and was like, ‘I’m so happy you guys are good.’ ”

“When I was writing this verse, I was saying these things to her for the first time,” Lorde says. “There was such a rawness and an immediacy to what I was saying. I love that we truly did work it out on the remix. There’s something very brat about that, something very meta and modern. Only Charli could make that happen. She had opened up a channel between us, and it made me say things that I had never said. I was articulating things I’d never said or maybe even things I’ve never even heard said. This whole thing has been such a huge honor.”

A week after the Sivan show, Charli is at her London home, getting her hair and makeup done for her Billboard cover shoot. With an 8 a.m. call time for glam and plans to later attend a promotional event in Northern England until late into the night, it’s evident that brat’s omnipresence is not due to sheer luck or even just great songs: It’s also largely the result of a relentless schedule of marketing and promotion by Charli and her team.

Sam Pringle, another co-manager of Charli’s since 2014, credits her as the mastermind behind all of it. He says Charli sent the team “a 20-page PDF breaking down every element of brat in full” in January before everything kicked off. “I should have known then that this was going to be a campaign like no other.”

Since then, Charli admits she has had practically no downtime, especially not after the album release. She did have a couple of days of recovery after her late-night DJ set at the Glastonbury Festival the weekend before her Billboard shoot, but “that’s about it,” she says, shrugging. “I feel good, but I’m overwhelmed as well. But also, I just love the music that I’ve made so much, which is not always the case… Luckily, I want to be doing all of this.”

Still, in the zenith of so-called “brat summer,” as fans say, Charli says she has more planned. The wall in Brooklyn that she used to tease out the deluxe release was recently taken down, which fans read as the end of the brat era. But Charli assuaged those fears on social media: “brat summer is only just beginning :).”

When asked if more remixes are yet to come, she answers, “Yes,” but coyly declines to offer details. She also says she’s planning to go to Poland for three weeks in August “to write a film there with…” Then she hesitates, catching herself before she gives too much away. “Well, I don’t really know if I should say because I also don’t know if we’re going to do it. We might actually just go to Poland and not do that, but that is the idea.”

She has never written a script before, but as a longtime cinephile, she’s excited to try. Why Poland? “Because it’s going to take place in Poland. We would write it and shoot it at the same time, kind of like making an album. One of the guys is the director — he works that way all the time.”

Long term, she’s less sure about where her musical career will go next. “I saw this tweet the other day that was like, ‘Does anyone think that this is Charli’s last album?’… Then I was like, ‘Actually, that could be cool if I didn’t really make music anymore after this,’ ” she admits. “I’m definitely thinking about it because I really want to act.” Then she pauses. “I don’t know. I’m just so deep in this, I can’t see outside of brat, but it’s funny. I kind of want to make a Lou Reed record, to be honest. That would definitely be a pretty big swing.”

And for that reason, it could be the perfect Charli move. The rest of the world might only just now be catching up to her, but “Charli’s been doing this,” as Lorde says. “She’s been Charli this whole time. She’s just put one foot in front of the other. Learned something from every project. Michelangelo apparently once said, ‘I’m just going to carve away all that is not David,’ and I feel that that’s what we are getting to witness in real time: Charli saying to herself, ‘I’m going to carve away all that is not Charli.’ It’s very, very big and special, powerful, fun, sick work that she does.”

This story will appear in the July 20, 2024, issue of Billboard.