After a decade-plus as a recording artist, Charli XCX finally makes her peace with the dual poles of art and commerce. Occasionally, those opposing forces lean into symbiosis, exactly what happened with Brat. The zeitgeist-conquering album seemed to be everywhere in 2024, from pop airwaves to presidential campaigns to memes. 

Taken as just music, Brat isn’t as ostentatious or overtly ambitious as its success would imply. Instead, it’s a musical love letter to the electronic dance music of Charli’s formative years of the 2000s that mostly existed outside the pop mainstream. That provides a backdrop to the startlingly candid lyrics and singing that appear throughout the album. But Brat is a pop record, with all of the immediate thrills the term implies. 

The centerpiece is “Sympathy is a Knife,” a staggering piece of machine pop music with lyrics that seem to be about the deep inadequacy Charli feels in encounters with an unnamed pop star, apparently Taylor Swift. The cascading waves of autotuned howls sound like her ego fracturing. “Girl, so confusing” is another highlight, with slamming electroclash beats that contrast with an understated, vulnerable vocal performance.

A later version of the song expanded on the original theme with a new verse from Lorde and is included in the companion release Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat. That version pairs the original album with remixes for each song and manages to be essential listening, expanding the themes, beats and melodies and sending them veering off into new directions with new collaborators, a cohesive and brash monument in electric limeade green.