It has been two years since “Brat summer,” the long-deserved frenzy spawned by Charli XCX’s sixth studio album — the record that vaulted her from fringe pop artist to bona fide superstar.
Now she is back with her seventh studio album, unveiled alongside a companion short film that recently screened for a crowd of die-hards at New York’s Metrograph.
If Brat was all neon-lit hedonism, the new material trades some of that adrenaline for something more reflective — a pop record that lingers on friendship, memory and the strange vertigo of getting everything you wanted.
It is the sound of an artist metabolizing her own sudden fame in real time, and proof that Charli’s restless reinvention is far from finished.