If there is a color that can define the summer of 2024, it will be that highly saturated neon green. And if there is a name for that color, it will be brat green. From a wall in Lower Brooklyn to anyone’s profile on X, and eventually a part of the presidential campaign from a popular candidate the neon green color had already blasted a huge storm on social media. But behind the hype and success is a name that had been forgotten for a decade by the mainstream media. Let’s Rewind.

Charlotte Emma Aitchison, professionally known as Charli xcx is a weird phenomenon in mainstream music. It is rare when a pop star is willing to give up their popularity and focus on making music that appeals to a particular media group, especially when you own a billboard number one track. Even though Charli did obtain an incredible amount of critical success and a loyal fan base with her qualitative hyperpop albums, the idea that she would become a more commercially successful artist still stuck in her head, and she sometimes wished to rewind into the start of her career when she used to never think about Billboard, as she confessed on the track “Rewind.” The vulnerability she showed previously continued on the track, “Girl, so confusing” in which she describes the peer pressure of being compared to another female artist by the internet and how their similar appearance became an awkward distance that impedes Charli from understanding her feelings. But the story ended up breaking the internet as the line. “Let work it out on a remix,” comes out on, “The girl, so confusing version with Lorde.” 

It is difficult to express a different perspective when two opposite dominant opinions are in the same room. The believer of feminism and misogyny had been in the corner of the internet since the very beginning of its birth. As their fight continued to penetrate through the media, some artists were often criticized and sometimes personally attacked when they talked about specific topics. One example is jealousy and competition. The rapid synthesizer beat at the start of, “Sympathy is a knife,” marks the aggressiveness of this track, but deep down in the lyrics, xcx directly addresses her jealousy toward a female musician that she claims to be way more successful than she, surrounded by that girl will maximize her insecurities. But instead of making it like a diss track, xcx focuses the topic on her unmanageable thoughts and how she wishes she could stop this. Similarly, on the track, “So I”, xcx nodded to one of her important friends and producer Sophie, who passed away a few years ago, singing the repentance of taking distance from her, because she thinks her talent will overshadow her. The aggression and confession on this album mark an empowering bond between the listener and the concept of personality, “Brat,” which xcx builds up with her authentic lyricism and neat production.  

“You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like, parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, do dumb things,” Charli xcx answered when she was asked the definition of brat. Everyone could be a brat, she proudly announced. The high party energy in this album may be the major reason that Charli once again influenced mainstream music, as she captured the grievance of this post-pandemic era and enlightened it with a non-stoppable rotation of bangers, which fully express her personality and most importantly ideology of having fun.