Take the mindless, bare-bones charm of “Yeah,” a sassy refusenik rocker on which Charli, in her classic deadpan, repeats over and over how much she doesn’t want to feel anything — before cuing a cathartic, blown-out chorus when she suddenly admits that now she does want to feel. (Charli can inject wry humor into even the tersest lines; consider all she can do with a simple “wow” in the pixelated garage band opener “Rock Music.”) Another highlight, the swaggering pop-punk banger “Persona,” is one of those self-lacerating diss songs that Charli perfected on “Brat,” although this time the atmosphere is augmented by the steely din of buzz saw guitars.
Despite its lead single’s humorously demonstrative lyrics (“I think the dance floor is dead so now we’re making rock music”), this is not exactly a traditional rock album. Guitars hiccup, glitch or slowly bleed blooms of pooling distortion, serving merely as jumping-off points for the buoyant digital imaginations of Charli’s longtime collaborators, the producers A.G. Cook (their friendship is the subject of the sweetest song on the album, “Magic Metal Montana”) and Finn Keane. Here, they revel in grungy textures and states of decay as much as they usually do in highly reflective pop gloss.
If we must assign a genre, let’s call it Letterboxd-core, after the cinephile social media site of which Charli is a power user. Since “Brat,” Charli has also begun a prolific acting career, appearing in such interesting, under-the-radar fare as the travelogue indie “Erupcja” and the horror remake “Faces of Death.” (She’s also shooting an upcoming slasher with the Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike and an art-world satire directed by Cathy Yan, among other projects.)
On one of the album’s highlights, the wrenching and remarkably candid “Camera,” Charli openly admits that she enjoys acting so much that she has fantasized about making a “French exit” from her pop career. “It makes me want to throw my life away,” Charli sings with palpable angst, of her newfound love of acting, atop guitar chords that flicker like yawning shutters. She’s not even sure she’s a particularly good actress yet — “I don’t feel embarrassed even if I suck” — but that uncertainty gives her a thrill that music cannot always provide.
In October 2024, Charli released a star-studded remix album that served as a companion piece to “Brat” and implicitly proved how many A-list pop stars (Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Lorde) were now willing to answer her call to hop on a track. On this new album, though, she opts for only one featured artist … and it’s the 83-year-old body horror film auteur David Cronenberg. (News that, perhaps in homage to his 1981 cult classic “Scanners,” certainly made some heads explode.) Charli’s die-hards — called Angels, naturally — know that she has subtly referenced Cronenberg before, in the title and sex-meets-vehicular-violence cover image of her 2022 album “Crash.” But here Cronenberg’s surprisingly serene voice is the focal point, as he recounts, in an extended and genuinely moving spoken-word outro, the wisdom he gleaned from a near-death experience.
Lying on the pavement, wondering if he was dying, Cronenberg says, he thought not about the art he’d made or his legacy, but the people in his life. He realized that even the rarefied artists whose work has endured centuries aren’t immortal: “They are dead, they are gone. No one lasts for ever.”
Is ending an album this way a cop-out — a way of saying none of it matters? Charli, on the contrary, seems to find this reminder of transience artistically freeing, especially in the wake of her prior success. But even from the edge of existential oblivion, she and her co-conspirators can’t help but looking for the pop hook, and so they end the album by chopping up and looping Cronenberg’s voice into a rhythmic sample: “They are dead, they are gone — no one lasts forever.” Ashes to ashes, brat to brat.
