There is no escaping “brat summer.” Ubiquitous backdrops that are the same color as glow-in-the-dark bracelets, improper capitalization, thick-rimmed black sunglasses, and the nuanced embrace of the paradoxes haunting girlhood within the modern age, are all marks of a zeitgeist that is a paradox itself—brattiness. The line separating the word’s two meanings, one describing stubborn, uncooperative children and the other submissive partners in BDSM relationships, only grows fainter when listening to Charli XCX’s latest album.
Branding her music as club classics—and only a club classic—is, as Spencer Kornhaber, put it, deceptive. Yet, the British singer is no stranger to unorthodoxy. Her discography is a stage for brutally honest, catchy, and oftentimes messy soliloquies accompanied by glitchy beats and robotic vocals. “BRAT” is no exception. One cannot help but question whether songs like “I might say something stupid,” should be taken seriously as a flowing piano balladry plays in the background, only to be layered with vocals drenched in autotune. Even more, the song’s abrupt ending mid-sentence—which almost feels like an editing mistake—is immediately followed by the fast-paced and danceable “Talk talk,” which automatically drowns out whatever vulnerability was shed in the previous track. On the first listen, perhaps.
It is this stylistic subtlety that rightfully lends Charli’s album its power as a holistic summer anthem. The immediate cut-off of the song is the literal reenactment of its lyrics, saturated by uncertainty and anxiety (“I don’t feel like nothing special / I snag my tights out on the lawn chair / Guess I’m a mess and play the role”). This, and the song ending with the beginning of a sentence, “I,” speaks candidly to the insecurities many young people, particularly women, feel today, navigating a digitalized world where they are exposed to unrealistic standards on a daily, scroll-by-scroll basis.
Charli’s vulnerability and relatability are much needed, especially when it comes at a time when being a woman has never been so exploited for unearthing expired narratives of femininity. Lately, TikTok has become littered with “trad wife” videos detailing women in full-glam, flowery silk gowns, and perfectly done hair-packing lunches for their husbands, or outlining the beautiful simplicity of domesticity by filming their “duties” as a wife and mother—all occurring under the backdrop of an election which can severely undercut reproductive and women’s rights the more a Trump and J.D. Vance (a man who proposed a nationwide abortion ban) ticket becomes a reality.
So, when songs like “I think about it all the time,” unapologetically air out uncertainties about motherhood (“And a baby might be mine / ‘Cause maybe one day I might / If I don’t run out of time / Would it make me miss all my freedom?”), especially from the perspective of a 31-year-old woman, it feels like a return to reality. One where women are valued not for their ability to bear children and perform their “duties,” but to exist as a bundle of uncertainties and complications—a condition “BRAT” depicts as inherent creative labor. Charli’s album is, if anything, immunization from the male gaze and its split hypothesis of woman as either the submissive, dutiful wife or the alternative—a cold, hard, unattractive “career woman,” à la a Charlotte York and Miranda Hobbes dynamic.
“BRAT” has also made its mark on U.S. politics this past week, effectively stumping many Republicans. After Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, Democrats passed the torch to Kamala Harris as the new face of the party in the upcoming election. Her campaign quickly underwent a transformation—or rather a “bratification.” Kamala HQ took control of the former Biden-Harris campaign pages on X and Instagram, introducing signature neon-green headers and pinned posts featuring a fuzzy, stylistically all-lowercase font.
While a clear grab for Gen-Z voters who, like many online users, view “BRAT” as the latest Bible, it remains unclear whether or not Kamala embodies Charli’s vision behind the word’s meaning, which she explained in a TikTok: “That girl who is a little messy and likes to party, and maybe says dumb things sometimes, who feels herself but then also maybe has a breakdown but parties through it. It’s very honest; it’s very blunt—a little bit volatile, does dumb things, but, like, it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.”
If it’s hard to view Kamala on a speedboat in a strappy white top with a Bic lighter—some of the material essentials for living a brat summer as laid out by Charli—you’re not alone. When “BRAT,” isn’t engaged with campaign tactics, it asks for the embrace of messiness—with an arguable focus on those in their late 20s and early 30s; a time when people are either having children of their own or, in the wise words of “360” they’re “Bumpin’ that / Bumpin’ that Bumpin’ that” at the club. To be brat is to be free, to welcome an esthetics of boldness equipt with tight ironic baby tees, leftover smudged eyeliner, studying Julia Fox’s entire oeuvre, considering a wolf cut, and spending hot afternoons inside ruminating on the vicissitudes of motherhood.
In an album that leaks out with Charli’s vulnerability, flooded with feelings directed towards industry competition, jealousy, a hot-and-cold friendship with Lorde, motherhood, sex, mean girls, and just having a good time at the club, “BRAT” and Charli XCX assert a version of femininity that has proven to resonate in female and queer spaces because it is an unabashedly faulty switchblade of maturity and immaturity, coyness and seriousness, violence and love.
