Juliette Des Rosiers ’26
Editor-In-Chief
As the brat green leaves of brat summer faded to orange and descended into brat fall, Charli XCX gifted fans with the brat remix album, Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat. The album was comprised entirely of collaborations, including four previously released singles and 12 new renditions of well-loved brat bangers.
As I packed for my October break trip to Joshua Tree, I connected my phone to my speaker to tune into the remix album. I had waited alongside new and old Charli fans in anticipation as she teased the featured artists via a series of neon green billboards, excited to hear the inclusion of artists such as Robyn, Tinashe, and Caroline Polachek.
Thrilled by the first four tracks, I texted my friends to urge them to queue the album in their road trip playlist. To my dismay, the album fell to mixed reviews. According to my friends, the album sounded like “music at a bad European club.” They felt songs such as “Club classics”, “B2b”, and “Mean girls” lost their sing-ability, leaning too far into the scattered sonics of hyperpop. Though the songs may have lost their commercial appeal and may turn off casual listeners of Charli XCX, I argue that the remix album reinforced Charli’s skill to marry complex emotions with interesting mixes and showcased her musical prowess amid her skyrocketing success.
The remix album is true to its title, as Charli XCX rebranded the songs into “completely different” tracks, both sonically and lyrically, but still are true to their brat identities. An arguable strength of the album is how the aesthetic is revised under the lens of Charli XCX’s redefined fame, and thus, songs are adapted to provide a new view into her evolving mindset.
Almost every song on the remix album is twinged with the complex melancholy of fame and success, with frequent musing on the confusing demands of the music industry. This was teased in the preliminary release of “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde” where Lorde and Charli XCX “worked it out on the remix” and put their tabloid-authored ‘feud’ to rest.
Even more so, tracks such as “Sympathy is a knife featuring ariana grande”, “I might say something stupid featuring the 1975”, and “So I featuring a.g. cook” referenced Charli grappling with her mainstream success. In “Sympathy is a knife”, Charli and Grande described how the trajectory of their public and private lives changed under the limelight. They felt pulled between their old lives before fame and their new, inescapable lives where their “old friends hate [their] new friends” and “they are counting on your mistakes.” The song transformed from a stressed track about being self-aware of their outsider status into a stressed track about the sacrificial, menacing politics of fame, showcasing how Charli XCX continues to package emotional vulnerability into seemingly enthusiastic beats.
Similarly, “Everything is so romantic featuring caroline polachek” takes a new angle to a song about finding joy in simple, fleeting moments. Previously, the song carried a warm, reflective quality where Charli’s imagery romanticized the specific but recognizable snippets of a sunny vacation. However, the sonic reliance on minor-chord strings in the remix, as well as Polachek’s quirky verses, restructured the song to include a sadder, nostalgic tone. They now reference mundane but reliable facets of London life that seem to be viewed in the rearview. They chronicle a conversation that notes “all things change in the blink of an eye” and Charli asks Polachek, “living that life is still romantic, right?”, returning to the reimagined theme of remixed brat: Charli’s tandem gratitude and disdain for her fame.
Beyond lyricism, Charli XCX also flexed her production muscles when rebuilding the aesthetics of the remix album. My favorite quality of the songs was the complete influence of the featured artist. Charli refused to settle for a new verse or bridge with her collaborator but instead changed the composition of the song to integrate their sound equally. For example, “Talk talk featuring troye sivan” was very obviously Troye Sivan-ified, losing some of the original jumpy rhythms for a more grooving chorus. Similarly, “So I featuring the 1975” is reminiscent of the dynamic instrumentals of tracks such as “Please Be Naked,” with muted vocals. Songs such as this and “I think about it all the time featuring bon iver” scrap the majority of the original song in favor of verses primarily performed by the featured artist, harnessing the power of true artistic collaboration. This embrace of divergent sounds is relatively rare and has demonstrated Charli’s genuine enthusiasm to celebrate her collaborator rather than using the partnership as a performative money grab.
Though songs such as “365 featuring shygirl” and “Mean girls featuring julian casablanca” were revised into mainly instrumental tracks, I believe they exemplify Charli XCX’s uncompromising commitment to making music for herself and her fans, first and foremost. Her exclusion of conventional production sidelines her commercial success to stay true to her hyperpop roots. Although this deterred some fans of brat, longtime fans found familiar callbacks to the layered, engaging mixing Charli has always championed.
The brat remix album was a masterful celebration of musical genres and collaboration, a story of the tribulations of success, and an attempt to remind listeners who Charli XCX is: a hyperpop princess always, a mainstream pop princess only most recently.
Photo Courtesy: Juliette Des Rosiers ’26
