Brat Summer: How Charli XCX Branded a Pop Aesthetic Into a Season

## A Color That Became a Season

Brat was released on June 7, 2024. Within two weeks the album's flat, blurry, lime-green cover had become a visual meme so widely repurposed that it briefly seemed to coat the entire internet. Brands rebranded. Public-figure announcements adopted the type. A US presidential campaign briefly leaned into it after Charli XCX herself co-signed the candidate with the phrase that was already circulating. By the end of summer 2024, "brat" had stopped being just an album title and become a season, an attitude, and an aesthetic ratified by Collins Dictionary's word-of-the-year nod.

What the lime-green cover did, structurally, was provide a single visual handle for an album whose music was sometimes confrontational, sometimes confessional, and rarely tidy. The album's interior was complicated. The cover was simple. That asymmetry is part of why the imagery traveled so far so fast, and why the album underneath it kept rewarding listeners who arrived for the meme and stayed for the production.

The choice of lime green was not arbitrary, and Charli has spoken about wanting a color that read as deliberately ugly, as a refusal of the soft pastel palettes that had dominated late-2010s and early-2020s pop branding. The blurry low-resolution image processing reinforced the refusal. The cover looks intentionally bad in the way 2008-era flash photography looks intentionally bad. It is the visual equivalent of a smudged-eyeliner attitude, and the readability of that attitude is what made the cover so portable. Anyone who saw it could parse the reference, regardless of whether they had heard a single note of the music underneath.

A Long PC Music Lineage

Charli XCX's collaboration with A. G. Cook, founder of the PC Music label, goes back to her 2016 EP Vroom Vroom. PC Music in the mid-2010s was a kind of pop-music laboratory: hyper-bright synthesizers, distorted pop-rave breakdowns, and a deliberate engagement with the textures of internet culture. Charli was one of the few major-label pop artists who genuinely integrated that lab work into her commercial releases. Albums and mixtapes including Pop 2 (2017) and Charli (2019) helped translate PC Music ideas into a wider pop vocabulary that artists from Caroline Polachek to Rina Sawayama would later draw on.

The lineage matters because Brat is sometimes described as Charli XCX's mainstream breakthrough, when it is more accurately described as the moment the mainstream became willing to come to her. The album is the most commercial-sounding work of her career in places, particularly on songs like "360" and "Von dutch," but the production logic, the distorted vocal stabs, the hard-edged sub-bass, the rave-pop song structures, are continuous with what she and Cook were doing in 2016. Brat is the PC Music sensibility presented in plain wrapping.

The pre-Brat Charli XCX catalog provides the context for why the album's reception felt so culturally specific. Pop 2, the 2017 mixtape, is often cited as one of the most influential pop releases of the late 2010s, even though it never achieved mainstream commercial success at the time. Tracks like "Track 10" and "Out of My Head" prefigured the production logic that Brat would later make mainstream. The seven years between Pop 2 and Brat were, in retrospect, the period during which the broader pop audience caught up to where Charli and the PC Music collaborators had already been working. The mainstream did not converge on Charli XCX's sound by accident. It converged because the conditions of the late-2020s pop economy, including streaming-platform algorithms that reward sustained niche audiences, finally made room for a sound that had been waiting at the underground level for a decade.

SOPHIE, the Confessional, and the Remix Continuation

Charli has been candid about the influence of SOPHIE, the late producer whose work with PC Music helped define its sound, on Brat. SOPHIE's 2018 album Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides remains one of the foundational electronic-pop records of the past decade, and SOPHIE's production work with Charli on Vroom Vroom and Pop 2 left a stylistic imprint that Cook and Charli have continued to develop. The song "So I" on Brat is widely understood as a tribute to SOPHIE; the lyric reads as an attempt to think honestly about a friendship that ended too early, and the production references the kinds of bright, metallic synth voices SOPHIE was known for.

The presence of that lineage is part of why Brat reads as a serious work even when its surface is throwaway party-pop. The album takes the PC Music sound forward in a particular direction, one that is willing to use its mainstream platform to commemorate the underground figures who built it. The most-discussed song on Brat in the weeks after release was "Girl, so confusing," a confrontational lyric about a complicated relationship with another rising woman in pop. The track's spoken-word bridge ("People say we're alike, they say we've got the same hair...") read like a text message left as a voice memo, in a way that pop songs rarely allow themselves to be. When Lorde appeared on a June 2024 remix to answer Charli verse by verse, the result was a public reconciliation song that did the unusual work of dissolving a pop-rivalry narrative through collaboration rather than continuing it through silence.

Across the album, the confessional impulse is consistent. "Sympathy is a knife" navigates jealousy. "I think about it all the time" interrogates her own ambivalence about having or not having children, in a way few mainstream pop songs touch. "Apple" reads as a lineage of a mother-daughter relationship through a recurring fruit-based image. These are not light songs. The lime-green party cover is, in this sense, deliberately misleading. The album invites you in for a rave and asks you to sit with a friend's anxieties on the bathroom floor.

In October 2024 Charli released Brat and It's Completely Different But Also Still Brat, a remix album that reworked every track on the original with a guest collaborator. The list of features read like a survey of contemporary pop: Lorde, Billie Eilish, Bon Iver, The 1975, Robyn, Caroline Polachek, Tinashe, Bladee, Yung Lean. The remix album extended the Brat era from a summer event into a year-long campaign, and it functioned as a creative reset for what a remix album could be: not a contractual filler release, but a second pass at the album's themes from inside other artists' voices. The remix album also did the practical work of holding the Brat universe open after the cultural meme started to fade. By the time December 2024 arrived, audiences had been given roughly twice as much Brat material as they had in June, with each release producing new viral clips, new collaborative storylines, and new reasons for the lime-green color to keep showing up on social media.

What Brat Did to the Pop Landscape, and What Comes After

Brat reshaped two visible things about 2024 pop. The first is the pop album cover. After Brat, multiple major releases adopted flat color, lowercase type, and minimal imagery in ways that read as direct response. The second is the willingness of mainstream pop artists to record more abrasive, rave-leaning production. Brat's success suggested that the long-standing assumption that mainstream pop has to be glossy and full-spectrum was less rigid than it had appeared. A song could be a hit while also sounding like a 2am club track.

The Brat era's broader cultural footprint, branded objects, political memes, mass-market language adoption, was unusual for an album of its production lineage. Most albums that come out of underground electronic-pop circles do not redefine a season. Brat did, partly because Charli XCX has spent ten years preparing the cultural infrastructure for that moment and partly because the lime-green cover was the right visual handle at the right time. The album also benefitted from a particular media-environment vacuum. The summer of 2024 did not have a single dominant new pop event before Brat arrived, and the album filled the space so completely that its imagery functioned as the year's default summer pop reference.

Charli ended the Brat era in late 2024 with an announcement that the cycle was closing, signaling she would move toward a new project. The decision to draw a hard line at the end of a successful era is unusual in contemporary pop, where momentum is typically extended for as long as possible. The choice to close the era cleanly is itself a Brat-era gesture: a refusal to over-extend, a willingness to leave the audience asking what comes next. Brat Summer will be looked back on as the moment a long-running pop laboratory finally got its mainstream payoff. The next chapter, whatever it is, will start from a different audience size and a different cultural footprint than any prior Charli XCX rollout. The infrastructure she and A. G. Cook built over a decade is now mainstream infrastructure. Whatever Brat becomes in retrospect, it has already changed what mainstream pop is allowed to sound like, and the artists who follow will be working inside the conditions Brat established whether they acknowledge the influence or not.