It’s the era of the relatable pop star, where the Machiavellian hustlers of the music industry A-list write songs about being as unlucky and confused as you and I. These days, the world’s biggest musicians are apparently also the salt of the earth, perpetually downtrodden by their relationships or jobs. They’re down bad but they’re doing the work, jamming the radio with songs about setting boundaries or learning their moon sign. And have you heard? Their latest album is their most vulnerable to date, despite the public’s seeming allergy to moral ambiguity and the sense that it’s been years since anyone was remotely honest about their motivations. Are you having fun yet?

Meanwhile, Charli XCX has been dreaming of a time when the It Girls were hot messes, flashing the paparazzi as they tumbled from the Chateau or looking feral outside Les Deux at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday. The Bimbo Summit’s on her mood board, as are the neon-splattered club nights of the mid- to late-2000s, back when dance music was in its bedroom-producer phase and pop singers were still divas who’d never condescend that they were anything like you. It’s a vibe that’s rather popular as of late. (Oh, to be a creative director tasked with explaining “indie sleaze” to Camila Cabello.) But Charli lived it, albeit as an English teenager whose MySpace demos had titles like “Art Bitch,” raging vicariously through the blogosphere.

BRAT, the sixth album from the 31-year-old songwriter, has roots in this stretch of the aughts, which holds a tenuous claim to the last IRL gasp of “alternative culture” before it moved into our phones. It’s also a reaction, as Charli’s records tend to be: to the focus-grouped monotony of playlist-fodder pop, the tedium of our current “authenticity” obsession, and to her previous album, 2022’s Crash, which posed the question: “What might it sound like if I did sell out?” If you read trendy literature or spend much time on “X,” you might recognize the mode of defensive self-awareness, pre-empting the possibility of sounding like an idiot or looking like a flop. That album—on which she utilized for the first time in a decade the A&R services of her label, Atlantic Records—was her first to top the UK Albums Chart. But it lacked the culture-shifting oomph of a Vroom Vroom or Pop 2, records that felt like risks that no one else would take. Joining their category and transcending it, BRAT arrives as the best-sounding version of the Charli XCX promise to make the Apollonian pop landscape Dionysian again.

The moment bent to Charli as the winter turned to spring, beginning with the February Boiler Room set that broke the company’s RSVP record within a matter of hours. In a sweaty Bushwick warehouse, alongside BRAT producers A. G. Cook and EasyFun, she debuted the album’s first single, “Von dutch,” whose revving synths trigger flashbacks to the mid-’00s electro of Boys Noize and the Bloody Beetroots, with a hitch before the drop you can feel inside your gut. “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me,” she yelps, winking but meaning it. The imperial streak continues on its follow-up, “Club classics,” over whose stripped-down bounce she declares her intentions to dance to her own tracks all night. Is it just me or is “360” her best pure pop tune in ages? (The video, teeming with It Girls, feels heavy-handed but not unearned.) For years, both Charli and her critics seemed distractingly obsessed with her position—the darling of the underground who either would or could not graduate to Main Pop Girl. Then something shifted, and it hardly seemed to matter. She had something they didn’t. She was cool.

With the charts full of warmed-over disco and weepy Reddit-detective pop, I’d have happily accepted 15 high-end throwback bangers about being iconic and dressing like you’re on The Simple Life, as Charli seemed to tease. And as an homage to French dance music of the late ’90s and 2000s, from the euphoric filter house of Crydamoure and Roulé to Ed Banger’s heavy metal disco, BRAT delivers. I hear Bangalter and Braxe in the compressed ecstasy of “Talk talk,” the sweetness of Breakbot on “Apple,” shades of DJ Mehdi’s piano drama on “Mean girls.” “Rewind,” a love letter to MySpace-era naivety, is served up in ditzy spoken word somewhere between Uffie’s “Pop the Glock” and The Teaches of Peaches. Charli reprises the affect on “Girl, so confusing,” a song that busts the floodgates of a dozen “indie dance” memories I was certain I’d repressed. Not once in 42 minutes does the momentum fade.

But past the singles, Charli complicates the idea she’s introduced of the imperious bad bitch whose ideas the world loves to jack, beginning to explore much more fascinating themes: jealousy, narcissism, “girl power.” On “I might say something stupid,” whose Gesaffelstein piano chords distill the essence of early Justice, she returns to her liminal position in the industry, describing with writerly precision the feeling of being the least famous person at the party: “Snag my tights out on the lawn chair/Guess I’m a mess and play the role.” I’ve never had a Charli lyric bounce around my head the way that lines from “Apple” have, with its curious fruit allegory and wonderfully vague remarks about driving to the airport. On “Sympathy is a knife,” whose buzzsaw synths and modulated banshee howls sound most like the Charli we’ve known, she spirals over an acquaintance who taps her insecurities: “I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” (“Don’t want to see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show,” she goes on. “Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.” Wait…)

There are a handful of cute songs clearly directed to said boyfriend, the 1975’s George Daniel, now her fiancé. But BRAT’s most intriguing moments regard her relationships with women, which she unpacks with striking candor. The pop feminist discourse of the past decade never seemed to make it to the topic of competition, but on the sparkly/scuzzy “Girl, so confusing,” Charli goes there, painting a picture of a peer to whom she’s frequently compared, who’s either her long-lost BFF or perhaps wants to see her eat shit—it’s hard to say. (Surely Deuxmoi will have a field day with lines like “You’re all about writing poems, but I’m about throwing parties,” but for now let’s enjoy the mystery.) If you’re a certain kind of online, you’ll pretty quickly recognize the motifs of “Mean girls”: cigarettes, vocal fry, daddy issues, Catholicism. Yes, it’s the first major label pop song inspired by the Red Scare podcast. It’s also a counter—a catchy one, at that—to what the “Relatable Era” demands of artists. Is there a way to be a pop star without being a role model? Can a woman feel empowered without being a girlboss? Can she reject the pose of perma-victim and still make resonant art?

These ideas feel substantial in new ways for Charli. Writing BRAT, she quieted her inner industry pro who strung together vowel sounds and buzzwords that rhymed, approaching her lyrics as if she were typing a gossipy text to a friend. The method worked, nudging songs about subjects like grief and motherhood past the usual clichés of “confessional writing” and into reality. The somber “So I” is about missing SOPHIE, Charli’s late mentor; it’s also about how terrifying it can be to be friends with a genius. Much ink will be spilled about “I think about it all the time,” where a visit to a friend who recently became a mother inspires life-altering questions about what her freedom’s worth. But what gives the story life is the striking admission that, alongside tenderness and joy, she feels a sting of jealous FOMO: “She’s a radiant mother and he’s a beautiful father, and now they both know these things that I don’t.” You might call it her most vulnerable record to date, if you’re into that sort of thing.