For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — you can see the artists we’ve already counted down, plus our Honorable Mentions, Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all right here. Now, at No. 5, we remember the year in Charli XCX — who released a career-defining masterpiece and ruled the summer (and autumn) in pop culture entirely on her own terms.
“I’m famous but not quite.”
The “I Might Say Something Stupid” lyric captured the quintessential dilemma of Charli XCX’s career in the decade leading up to her 2024. After 2013 and 2014 brought the British pop purveyor a trio of ubiquitous hits, via her appearances on Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Iggy Azealia’s “Fancy” and her own solo smash “Boom Clap,” it seemed like true superstardom was in the offing for her, and that shooting for anything less would’ve been selling her potential short.
But after some more commercially minded, purposefully accessible releases met with underwhelming returns and edgier, more forward-thinking sets cemented her as both a critics’ darling and an icon for the true popheads – all without producing any crossover hits the size of her 2013-14 trio – the question lingered over Charli XCX’s whole career: Was trying for stardom and celebrity actually the thing that was selling her potential short? Would she be better off continually scrapping to be the coolest kid on top 40’s fringes, or simply reigning as the unquestioned queen of the pop underground?
In 2024, she answered that question with a third option, one that few – perhaps her least of all – would have previously believed available: She became one of the biggest stars in the world by just being herself, but like, way moreso. Brat saw Charli XCX condense everything fans had come to love about her in the prior decade, regardless of release – the colossal pop hooks, the hair-flipping (and occasionally bird-flipping) attitude, the self-referential winking, the melted-bubblegum production, the almost uncomfortably intimate moments of vulnerability or sensuality – and turned the volume on all of it up to 365, while also inviting the entirety of her social and professional circles to join in the party. The result was a year that proved that Charli never actually had to choose between her populist and her futurist impulses; she just needed to indulge all of it at once on the biggest scale possible, and the rest of the globe would be powerless to resist the brightness of her supernova.
Easier said than done, of course, and Charli needed to spend the early parts of 2024 lighting the fuse for that kind of ignition. She DJ’ed a much-hyped Boiler Room set in February that signaled that her new project was going to be a reconnection with her club roots – following the self-consciously radio-oriented jams of her 2022 LP Crash, which failed to establish her as a leading pop hitmaker but did get her into the top 10 of the Billboard 200 (and No. 1 on her home country’s Official Charts) for the first time. The filmed open set also introduced fans to the cast of characters who would play big supporting roles both in her increasingly extended universe – including longtime producer and co-writer A. G. Cook, newer collaborator (and recently confirmed fiancé) George Daniel of The 1975, film star and fellow It GIrl Julia Fox, and TikTok phenom turned pop aspirant (and Charli muse) Addison Rae – all of whom were raving (and sometimes taking turns spinning) in the not-quite-booth with her.
Then, a slow trickle of singles and videos, starting with the zooming synths and strutting vocals of “Von Dutch.” The song was a chest-puffer and a s–t-talker from its opening seconds: “It’s OK to just admit that you’re jealous of me… It’s so obvious, I’m your number one.” It was a clear statement of intent – though the actual intent maybe wasn’t totally clear yet, the statement part was what was important, as the purposefulness of it as an era kickoff was unignorable. Second single “360” doubled down with a timeless bubbling synth-pop riff and insidious vocal hooks that saw her further positioning herself as the super-strength Charli the Dancefloor Slayer: “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia,” “Legacy is undebated/ You gon’ jump if A. G. made it.” (That’s Fox and Cook in the lyrics there, respectively; you’d know if you’d been following along.)
Just as important a part of the pre-album rollout was Charli’s second takes on “Von Dutch” and “360.” The single redos each welcomed big-name guests – the previously mentioned Rae on “Von Dutch,” dismissing the haters who still end up adding to her view counts, and the cult-pop queen Robyn and cloud-rap paragon Yung Lean on “360,” both following Charli’s “I’m your favorite reference” lead with sung-spoken lyrics bigging up their own legacies (“Started so young, I didn’t even have email/ Now my lyrics on your booby”). Everything about the remixes, from their guests to their content to their matter-of-fact titling (e.g. “360 Featuring Robyn & Yung Lean”), clearly projected: Pay attention to what I’m doing here, because I’m going to be returning to it later.
First, though, it was time for the curtain to go up on Brat. Even before the album’s June release, Brat had already become a minor pop culture phenomenon, just by virtue of its title and artwork, unveiled in April. The simplicity of the album title, its value-ambiguity as a self-applied label, and (most importantly) its adaptability as both a noun and adjective all made it the year’s most naturally conversational LP title. Similarly, the set’s monochromatic, near-fluorescently-bright-green cover – blank, except for the centered, all-lowercase and slightly out-of-focus album title – proved divisive among fans, but quickly internet-iconic, and a magnetic jumping-off point for assorted memery. All the while, a frequently repainted wall in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood – ultimately known as the “Brat Wall” – would provide an informal weather forecast for Charli’s next moves on the pre-album campaign, electrifying social media on a semi-weekly basis with its new art developments.
If there were any remaining doubts that the music could live up to the memes with Brat, the album put them to bed on first listen. Much of the LP followed in the hyperkinetic, living-that-life mold of “Von Dutch” and “360,” with the latter opening the set and even getting bookended with twin closer “365,” an even-more-explicit anthem of party-girl decadence. But fans were less prepared for the emotional depths the set would plumb, with Charli exploring her own professional insecurities (“Sympathy Is a Knife,” “Rewind”), her major life decisions (“I Think About It All the Time”) and even her fraught relationship with close collaborator SOPHIE in the years before her death (“So I”), all with disorienting honesty and directness. These songs went for the heart and the gut, but without sacrificing the ass – aside from “So I,” the lone mid-album ballad breather, even the record’s most brutal cuts were still delivered in service of the dancefloor, making Brat endlessly re-bumpable.
Brat became consumed by pop culture so quickly following its release that it can be easy – though maybe not that easy, given how many year-end critics’ lists it ultimately topped, including the Billboard staff’s own – to lose track of what a tremendous artistic accomplishment it really was. It’s easy to make an album for the club, but it’s exceptionally difficult to make an album that feels like it itself is the club: the venue, the DJ, the dancefloor and the entire guest list. And while Brat obviously lets any number of Charli’s fabulous famous friends past the velvet rope for its 41 minutes of id-stroking self-celebration, it remembers that any true club night also includes the girl hiding in the back because she’s convinced herself she’s worn the totally wrong outfit, and the friends busy gossiping and scrolling Instagram while waiting in line for the bathroom, and the couple preoccupied with dreading the ride home, because they realize they can’t avoid that conversation they’ve been avoiding any longer. It all made for an impossibly rich and immersive LP experience, one that stayed challenging and unpredictable and still thoroughly, peerlessly exciting and satisfying throughout.
And as it turns out, it was just the beginning. Brat was an immediate success, debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 – Charli’s first top-five showing on the chart – and vaulting “360” onto the Hot 100 for the first time, at a modest No. 73. Given those early returns, the rave reviews the album received and the continued internet embrace of all things Brat – with the phrase “Brat Summer” already picking up steam in the media as an official epoch designation – Charli very easily could have declared victory with her album cycle, switched her focus to touring and just let Pop Twitter take it from there. Instead, she did something that no one – not even Charli herself weeks earlier – could have seen coming.
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