Charli XCX combines pop excellence and marketing acumen in latest album.
Unlike the iconic hue of her recent album Brat, Charli XCX isn’t green. The Essex-born artist made her Billboard debut in 2012 with Icona Pop collab single “I Love It,” followed by “Boom Clap” in 2014. In the decade since, Charli XCX has eschewed traditional pop stardom in favor of developing a more experimental sound – although she has stated that she does “not identify with music genres,” her EP “Vroom Vroom” (produced by the late SOPHIE) is widely credited with pioneering the subgenre of hyperpop. The avant-garde pivot has made her a critical darling, but the singer isn’t immune to doubt about the road not taken. “I used to never think about Billboard / But now I've started thinkin' again / Wonderin' 'bout whether I think I deserve commercial success,” she sings wistfully on “Rewind.”
The smash debut of Brat has earned Charli XCX that elusive commercial success alongside critical acclaim, proving that she is not just a pop savant but a savvy businesswoman to boot. “I like the marketing of pop music more than I am interested in actual pop music,” she recently told Billboard magazine. “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?” The buzz around Brat might look effortless, but its branding and go-to-market strategy have been a masterclass in shrewdly cultivating that desire.
Take, for instance, the album's distinctive cover art. Kermit might have lamented that bein’ green means blending in, but the aggressive lime color of Brat was designed to stand out: Charli XCX and her creative team spent five months selecting the perfect bilious shade. The typography, a pixelated Arial font, is an homage to social media in the early aughts, an era which inspired the album. The resulting aesthetic is “garish” and “unfinished,” according to Brat creative consultant Brent David Freaney. It’s a clever combination that both draws the consumer’s eye and hints at the whiplash of its tracklist, which ping pongs frenetically between brash beats that ooze confidence and tender tracks revealing an underlying insecurity.
If its catchy tunes and slick branding poised Brat for success, the ingenious rollout of the project secured the momentum for its dizzying cultural ascent. The music video for “360,” the album’s final single, began to stoke online furor ahead of Brat’s release by teasingly showcasing internet icons including Julia Fox, Gabriette, and Rachel Sennott. The video even includes a cameo from OG “it girl” Chloë Sevigny, who struts out of a convertible to join her fellow microcelebrities in a group pose reminiscent of a Renaissance painting, with Charli XCX at its center. “I was told everyone was doing bratty versions of themselves,” Sevigny remarked of the direction she received for her guest appearance.
Sevigny’s remarks speak to the creative vision of Brat, which Charli XCX has described as inclusive despite its trappings of exclusivity – anyone can be a brat in their own unique way. “Actually, everyone can join the club. It’s just that everybody joins at slightly different times in slightly different ways,” she explained. Deliberate marketing has helped extend that open invitation to fans (Charli XCX noted that “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” are points of contact which allow fans to “join the club”), but it has also contributed to an ethos of authenticity, according to former Warner Music strategist Hugo Lieber (MBA ’26). “What really hits home is an ability to communicate authentically with fans and bring them into the fold…Brat was a perfect storm of cultural moments and marketing,” he explained. Brat’s social media rollout has been especially instrumental in building that genuine connection. For instance, social media posts come directly from Charli XCX’s accounts, and her “anti-promotion” promotions – such as a tongue-in-cheek tweet poking fun at marketing ideas presumably from her label – positions Brat as a subversion of commercial expectation. Other posts lean into meme culture by sharing Brat art generators or semi-jokingly proclaiming that “kamala IS brat.”
Iterations on tracks also showcase the refreshingly freewheeling and unpretentious nature of Charli XCX’s creative process. The remix of “Girl, so confusing” featuring Lorde, for example, was an unplanned addendum to the original track, in which Charli XCX reveals her misgivings about the “Royals” singer, whom she cryptically describes as a musician who prefers poetry to parties and has “the same hair.” Lorde, upon hearing the track the day before Brat’s release, suggested creating a new version of the song which resolves their grievances via lyrical dialogue – or, as her verse more punchily puts it, “let’s work it out on the remix.” “There was such a rawness and an immediacy to what I was saying,” Lorde noted. There’s something very brat about that…Only Charli could make that happen.” The spontaneous release spurred further excitement about the album, fulfilling the song’s winking prophecy that “when we put this to bed / the internet will go crazy.”
It’s this authenticity that gives Charli XCX a credible claim to both tap into and define our cultural zeitgeist with Brat. Clever social media presence is all but a requirement for musicians today, but Charli’s music has always been inextricably linked with social media (she made her musical debut by posting songs on MySpace in 2008). And although plenty of pop stars have recently paid lip service to 2010s indie sleaze, skeptics who accused Charli of merely appropriating the era were promptly reminded that she had lived it, performing in underground raves as a fourteen year-old. Nor can her work be reduced to stale club throwbacks, given her cutting edge contributions to hyperpop, a genre characterized by Atlantic magazine as a “rebellion [that] marches under the seemingly tame mantle of pop” by incorporating the transgressive properties of other genres such as, coincidentally, “punk’s brattiness.”
That first-hand experience likely helped her recognize the growing cultural backlash against the polished minimalism which dominated the early 2020s, musically and otherwise. The grimy party girl glamor of Brat is true to Charli’s origins, but it’s also a well-timed invitation to let loose in the face of an uncertain future and all its accompanying anxieties, a role pop music has historically played with aplomb (see the “recession pop” of 2008). However, the album is more than mere escapism. Its lighthearted promotion of debauchery conceals a more important offer it makes to young women in particular, urging them to consider a loud and unpolished alternative to the “clean girl” aesthetic of recent years. That messier mode of femininity is not limited to smudged eyeliner and three a.m. tequila shots – it also encourages honest examination into the messy complexity of women’s internal lives, including the less-than-perfect way they can treat other women. Like “Girl, so confusing,” many of the songs on Brat explore Charli’s fraught relationships with other women, which contain pettiness and jealousy just as they contain love and admiration. “You can, I think, experience envy and still be a good person who champions other women…[but] we don’t talk about it because we’re all supposed to be strong and confident,” she elaborated in an interview with Vox magazine.
Ultimately, Brat’s success indicates a growing hunger for pop that takes risks, according to Media & Entertainment Club co-president Miles Jefferson (MBA ’25). “I can't help but think that the rise of indie female artists like Charli and Chappell Roan are somehow a response to the success of super safe and clean cut [artists such as] Taylor Swift,” he pointed out. It’s time for pop to evolve beyond one-dimensional feminist anthems (such as Katy Perry’s cloying recent single “Woman’s World”) and role model girl-next-door pop stars. Better to be real than relatable, Brat argues. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the album shares a name with Barbie’s bolder and more impudent cousin (looking at you, Bratz). Move over Barbie pink – this summer is Brat green.
Danielle Mitalipov (MBA '25) is an RC interested in both sustainability and entertainment & media. She is a Student Sustainability Associate (SSA), and helped organize the HBS Climate Symposium. Prior to HBS, she studied philosophy at Stanford University, and led merchandising for a global brand at adidas. Outside of school, she is usually writing or watching the latest release at the Coolidge Corner Theater.
Comments