The 12:35pm Metro-North to Beacon was the brattiest train I’ve ever seen in my life. It was jam-packed with twentysomethings in fishnets and jangly jewelry, neon-dyed hair and all-pink tracksuits, crop tops and tall dark boots. Chartreuse-green everything. A group of friends chatted about their plans to go to an FKA twigs–themed rave night. Others compared the best Brooklyn bars for Hinge dates. “Do we know if Caroline Calloway is still alive?” someone in the row behind me asked, sounding genuinely concerned.
Reporters and label heads, TikTokers and art-park lovers, the unemployed—we were all here on a Thursday afternoon to visit Storm King Art Center, an open-air sculpture museum in New York’s Hudson Valley. The event: a last-minute show by Charli XCX. She was set to unveil her new remix album for BRAT, which is loaded with friends and fellow weirdos, from Ariana Grande to Bon Iver to Bb trickz to Bladee. BRAT is among the blockbuster albums of the year: critically raved about across the board, played at probably every cafe and party for months straight, flipped into a political rallying cry for Kamala Harris’ campaign. We should be sick of it by now, but it’s hard to resist when Charli keeps hurling stacked remixes and cheeky tricks like this Storm King one-off.
After reaching Beacon, shuttle buses transported us to the edge of the park. Walking in large clumps through a winding path of fall foliage, it felt like we were on a school field trip. The center of Storm King was like one of those Christmas village sets, except themed after BRAT: chartreuse-green cocktails, beverage stands with “Vitamin Water is BRAT” signs, and a two-sided wooden wall structure that looked like a huge version of a green folder you’d use in middle school science class. It listed every BRAT song along with the remix features and was so tall it seemed to dwarf Alice Aycock’s whirling, 29-foot Three-Fold Manifestation sculpture nearby.
When a dark van pulled up and Charli popped out, the 400 or so people crammed up the slope around the BRAT structure went berserk. There was no real stage or much of a setup beyond speakers, so she stood inside the structure, switching tracks through her phone like we were all huddled listening to a friend control the aux at a house party. “How motherfucking sick is this?” she beamed, swaggering in a fur coat and denim. “We’re fine-art bitches now.” Before starting, she took a moment to address how the remix album leaked with some classic Charli cheek: “I know that no one here listened to the leak. So, if you’re fucking singing the words, I’ll know!” Everyone cheered, and she hit play. With the Storm King event in mind, here are five takeaways from Charli XCX’s Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat.
This Is Basically a New Album
Unlike those remix albums that tack on five DJ flips of the same tune or specific genre edits of a handful of hits, Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat is pretty much a whole new project. The guts of most songs—lyrics, structures, beats, even the feelings—have been rewired, but without completely erasing the essence of the originals. Some bits seem to respond to the post-BRAT mega-fame; others turn completely haywire, like the mad detonation at the end of “Sympathy is a knife.” Midway through the Storm King set, Charli explained how she wanted the project to explore the “infinite possibilities of dance music” and the way that the DNA of a finished track often contains other, potentially even more exciting songs. “There’s still so many different versions of that song that could be made, using just a tiny element of the production from the original or a tiny reference to a lyrical concept.… Why just be like, ‘It’s the album and it’s done?’”
Maybe the Most BRAT Thing of All: Making Art With Your Friends
Teens and newscasters alike argued for months about the true meaning of BRAT: nonstop benders? Lines in the bathroom? Voting for Kamala Harris? What’s absolutely undeniable about Charli’s music, though, is the thrill and importance of collaboration and friendship, and the remix album manifests all of that with an eclectic ensemble cast. It’s basically Pop 3. You wish she’d pull in some lesser-known artists or more startling choices, and some features fall flat—Julian Casablancas’ Daft Punk drone smothers “Mean girls” like a soggy blanket—but, mostly, it’s a rush to hear such a wide array of tones and personas electrify the tracks. During the show, you could tell how happy she was to work with so many friends and peers, complimenting Caroline Polachek and Lorde’s performances as they unfurled live: “Didn’t she just eat this part up? She ate me up!”
The intimacy of the small crowd and lowkey setup mirrored the musical vibe and set, which felt more like a private listening party than a show with a popstar (she didn’t sing much). There was a goofy awkwardness; people didn’t seem to know whether to sway gently or pump their fists in the air. Poppers were passed around in the daylight and Charli blew kisses at sculptures.
The Party’s Winding Down
Only a few songs are just as or more hyper than they were on BRAT, like EASYFUN’s ravey new “365” and “Club classics,” the latter now featuring a taut whip of glitches and bars from the Spanish rapper Bb trickz. For the most part, the remixes dial down the havoc and clear space for Charli to contemplate. Her anxieties and confessions were the heart of BRAT’s sleaze manifesto, and they’re more upfront here. The new “B2b,” with Tinashe, is still propulsive but laced with meta commentary about how she’s booked nonstop and “fucking tired” now; she looked somewhat drained at Storm King, unsure of what she wanted the show’s vibe to be and leaving after 45 minutes because she had to travel to Denver to continue the Sweat Tour with Troye Sivan. The SOPHIE tribute “So I” is fleshed out to the point where it reads almost like a short story about how they met in Stockholm and made “Vroom Vroom” in a day, the times they ran around barefoot and played b2b sets. Other songs are refreshingly downtempo, from the ambient expanse of “I might say something stupid,” with Jon Hopkins and the 1975, to the celestial crawl of the new “Everything is romantic.” That one is a perfect landscape for Caroline Polachek to adorn with curlicued melodies and lines like “Church bells in the distance/Free bleeding in the autumn rain.”
The Afterglow
After a months-long bender, the remix album feels something like a comedown. Instead of post-party melancholia, a warm, bittersweet glow shrouds the record. The new version of “Apple,” with the Japanese House, sounds like a nostalgic cover someone would make 20 years down the line. When Charli’s verses on “So I” collapse into a glittering spree of “now I wanna think about all the good,” it sounds like she’s longing for SOPHIE but also pre-mourning the BRAT era, knowing she’ll look back at this moment one day as one of the most thrilling times of her life. The second to last song Charli played at Storm King, the new “Rewind,” slows down, spins out, and melts into blurry synths like a tape being waterlogged in a holy fountain. Lines like “Sometimes I wanna wake up dead” and Bladee’s “The sun is setting in my will” would sound glum if A. G. Cook and Cirkut’s production weren’t so radiant. It didn’t seem like she was going to play “Rewind” until a swarm of fans cried out. “Sorry, you have to appease the Drain Gang sometimes!” she winked.
Album and Show Observations That Fit Nowhere Else but Are Still Brat So Here They Are
- “Oh, the poppers, they’re out at the front!” Charli chirped during “365” like she’d just seen a rare squirrel species.
- More artists should do spontaneous shows in the wilderness.
- “Mean girls” would’ve been better if it featured a mean girl.
- There is no more perfect laser beam of a scream than Addison Rae’s on “Von dutch.”
- Shoutout to the BRAT grandmother decked out in chartreuse getting into it in the crowd.
- Brat and it’s so totally different from the remix album but also continues to be brat dream features: Jane Remover, Bassvictim, Snow Strippers, Doss, MGNA Crrrta, Uffie, Nia Archives, TNGHT, Smerz, Magdalena Bay, Whitearmor, jackzebra.
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