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The moment bent to Charli as the winter turned to spring, beginning with the February Boiler Room set that broke the company’s RSVP record within a matter of hours. In a sweaty Bushwick warehouse, alongside BRAT producers A. G. Cook and EasyFun, she debuted the album’s first single, “Von dutch,” whose revving synths trigger flashbacks to the mid-’00s electro of Boys Noize and the Bloody Beetroots, with a hitch before the drop you can feel inside your gut. “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me,” she yelps, winking but meaning it. The imperial streak continues on its follow-up, “Club classics,” over whose stripped-down bounce she declares her intentions to dance to her own tracks all night. Is it just me or is “360” her best pure pop tune in ages? (The video, teeming with It Girls, feels heavy-handed but not unearned.) For years, both Charli and her critics seemed distractingly obsessed with her position—the darling of the underground who either would or could not graduate to Main Pop Girl. Then something shifted, and it hardly seemed to matter. She had something they didn’t. She was cool.With the charts full of warmed-over disco and weepy Reddit-detective pop, I’d have happily accepted 15 high-end throwback bangers about being iconic and dressing like you’re on The Simple Life, as Charli seemed to tease. And as an homage to French dance music of the late ’90s and 2000s, from the euphoric filter house of Crydamoure and Roulé to Ed Banger’s heavy metal disco, BRAT delivers. I hear Bangalter and Braxe in the compressed ecstasy of “Talk talk,” the sweetness of Breakbot on “Apple,” shades of DJ Mehdi’s piano drama on “Mean girls.” “Rewind,” a love letter to MySpace-era naivety, is served up in ditzy spoken word somewhere between Uffie’s “Pop the Glock” and The Teaches of Peaches. Charli reprises the affect on “Girl, so confusing,” a song that busts the floodgates of a dozen “indie dance” memories I was certain I’d repressed. Not once in 42 minutes does the momentum fade.But past the singles, Charli complicates the idea she’s introduced of the imperious bad bitch whose ideas the world loves to jack, beginning to explore much more fascinating themes: jealousy, narcissism, “girl power.” On “I might say something stupid,” whose Gesaffelstein piano chords distill the essence of early Justice, she returns to her liminal position in the industry, describing with writerly precision the feeling of being the least famous person at the party: “Snag my tights out on the lawn chair/Guess I’m a mess and play the role.” I’ve never had a Charli lyric bounce around my head the way that lines from “Apple” have, with its curious fruit allegory and wonderfully vague remarks about driving to the airport. On “Sympathy is a knife,” whose buzzsaw synths and modulated banshee howls sound most like the Charli we’ve known, she spirals over an acquaintance who taps her insecurities: “I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” (“Don’t want to see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show,” she goes on. “Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.” Wait…)
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