
Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ is our Album of the Year
Why your favorite It Girl should take home the coveted Grammy award
Charli XCX received eight nominations for the 67th Annual Grammy Awards this Sunday.
Photo illustration by Ryan Quan
Words and art by Ryan Quan
If you spent any time online last year, you likely saw countless declarations of “brat summer,” memes displaying slightly blurry text on top of bright green backgrounds, and TikTok dancers splitting the apple down symmetrical lines. But even if you aren’t tapped into the latest online trends, you’ve probably still heard of Brat, Charli XCX’s sixth studio album, released last June.
Despite being one of the more experimental projects in the running for Album of the Year at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, Brat is the most critically acclaimed album of last year. Billboard, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Washington Post (just to name a few) all declared Brat as the number one album of 2024, but some people believe it isn’t deserved. Sure, they’re mainly devoted Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Ariana Grande stans, but it’s clear that not everyone is on board with a Charli XCX win.
I can’t persuade you to like Brat. I’ll be the first to admit that Charli’s music isn’t for everyone. Some people just don’t like electronic music and autotune. Others prefer to listen to slower, more mellow songs. But even if you don’t like the album, hopefully I can help you understand why fans and critics alike have rallied so intensely behind it.
From beginning to end, Brat is a complete journey
Brat starts off fast-paced and bold with three incredible tracks: the referential “360,” the catchy dance track “Club classics,” and the sincere tell-all that is “Sympathy is a knife.” And this third track is the album’s first hint that the Brat mindset is not just about embracing outer confidence and party culture. It’s also about confronting your self-doubt and that ever-present feeling of unbelonging. These emotions are addressed head-on in the album’s fourth track, “I might say something stupid,” in which a surprisingly dejected Charli sings about feeling nervous and uncomfortable at a party, not quite knowing if she truly deserves to be there. The album immediately jumps back into the effervescent with “Talk talk,” Charli’s vibrant retelling of the beginnings of her relationship with her husband George Daniel, and “Von Dutch,” a diss track about an unnamed subject.
In Brat’s seventh track, “Everything is romantic,” Charli vacations along the Amalfi coast, “a place that can make you change,” as she describes it. She lists everything she sees—the good and bad, the interesting and the mundane—and ends the song with a hypnotic repetition of the words, “Fall in love again and again,” which sounds both haunting and hopeful. The song acts as a necessary respite for Charli, a chance for her to take a step back from it all, the parties, award shows, and concerts.
Charli wrote the next track, “Rewind,” in response to the success of “Speed Drive,” the song she wrote for the Barbie soundtrack. She sings about how being in the spotlight has brought more attention to her insecurities and doubt than ever before. The ninth song, “So I,” is the saddest of the album, reflecting on Charli’s relationship with the late SOPHIE, her long-time collaborator and a pioneer of the hyperpop genre.
Next, in “Girl, so confusing,” Charli confronts her contentious relationship with Lorde, an artist she has been compared to throughout her entire music career. Though, it wasn’t actually confirmed that the song was about Lorde until the remix came out a few weeks later (fans also speculated it being about Marina Diamandis and Rina Sawayama). The next few songs on the album are the TikTok viral “Apple”; Charli’s ode to her roots in the electronic music scene, “B2B”; and the It Girl anthem, “Mean girls.”
The true duality of Brat is most evident in the album’s last two songs, “I think about it all the time” and “365.” The former is the third and final slow song of the record. It reflects on Charli’s relationship with motherhood and how her mainstream success has finally come at a time when most women are thinking about settling down and starting a family. It’s a brutally personal and brooding analysis of the pressures and expectations that women face as they age, all told with Charli’s signature autotuned vocals. But the song ends and “365” begins. This final song is a breakneck depiction of the non-stop nature of nightlife (it’s basically this video in a song). It samples Brat’s opening track, “360,” tying the entire album together and essentially turning it into a much larger metaphor for Charli’s cyclical lifestyle.
But the mainstream success of Brat also signifies an end to this life. The themes in these songs—being on the cusp of success, Charli’s relationships with the other women in her life, the ever-present feeling of unbelonging—have almost entirely been resolved by the album and people’s positive responses to it. For Charli, this project is the culmination of countless successes and failures over the past decade and a half of making music. Brat winning Album of the Year (especially over award season powerhouses like Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, André 3000, and Taylor Swift; Grammys first-timers Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, who've both had a phenomenal year; and Jacob Collier, who's also nominated) would cement Charli’s journey as an inspiring success story driven by her unwavering hard work and dedication to her authentic self and sound.
A win for the Asian diaspora
Some people believe that Charli isn’t in tune enough with her South Asian heritage to be considered part of the community. This idea furthers harmful discussions about being “Asian enough” and ignores the racism and discrimination Charli has experienced throughout her life and career. She still benefits from being White, but it's disingenuous to say that she isn't one of us, especially when she has publicly stated how she's proud of her Indian heritage.
The Brat era is also Charli’s most Asian era yet. The pop star’s hairstyle has changed drastically throughout her career, but we’ve seen her embrace her naturally curly, undeniably South Asian locks in the past few years. And the album’s more introspective themes—self-doubt and insecurity in “Girl, so confusing” and “Rewind,” generational trauma in “Apple,” imposter syndrome in “I might say something stupid” and “Sympathy is a knife”—although not exclusive to the Asian experience, are struggles that most of us can relate to. Like myself and many of my Asian peers, Charli has a fraught relationship with her parents and an ever-present feeling of unbelonging. I don't doubt that these struggles are at least somewhat rooted in her South Asian heritage.
Since the first Grammy Awards in 1959, only four artists of Asian descent have been awarded Album of the Year, and only two of those winners won with solo projects. In 1979, the Bee Gees accepted the award for Saturday Night Fever on behalf of all involved artists, including Japanese, Chinese, and Irish singer and actress Yvonne Elliman. In 1982, Yoko Ono and John Lennon won Album of the Year for Double Fantasy. Norah Jones, who is half Indian, won in 2003 for Come Away With Me, and lastly, the half-Filipino Bruno Mars won in 2018 with 24K Magic.
If Charli XCX wins Album of the Year, she would be the fifth Asian to take home the award. This isn’t to say that she should win because she is half Indian, but rather that her victory would be monumental for the Asian diaspora. We have no doubt been historically underrepresented in the entertainment industry, but we’ve proven in the past few years that we shouldn’t be overlooked. Brat winning, especially as an experimental and unapologetic electronic album, would be further proof that we are more than the stereotypes society has forced upon us. Not all Asians are docile, unfeeling brainiacs. Some of us are messy, some of us like to party, some of us are confrontational. And we can make a damn good album.
Published on January 31, 2025
Words and art by Ryan Quan
Ryan Quan is the Social Media Editor for JoySauce. This queer, half-Chinese, half-Filipino writer and graphic designer loves everything related to music, creative nonfiction, and art. Based in Brooklyn, he spends most of his time dancing to hyperpop and accidentally falling asleep on the subway. Follow him on Instagram at @ryanquans.