Like Pop 2—the clearest design in Charli's catalog for a project like this—Brat and… it's rude and reckless, and it's really sad. But romantic love is not a concern here. Anti, Brat and… siphons some of BRATIts main fuel: the idea that fame is too powerful, too harmful and too delusional intoxicating to deal with in a “normal” way.
The stakes are much higher now that my mom, your mom, and Ella Emhoff's mom have all identified themselves as “Brat” at one point. Seeing the most famous woman in the world on your friend's show apparently isn't as bad as hearing that your friends think you've changed. Wondering if you should have a baby is even more painful when the album you were wondering if you should have a baby on becomes so successful that the next three years of your life suddenly shut down completely. Brat and… has the aesthetic of a victory lap—Ariana Grande co-signs, monumental first-day streams, weird activation at a bucolic outdoor Hudson Valley art center—but its lyrics are often even sadder than those on BRATthe many hypotheticals of this album suddenly became true.
BRAT was one of Charli's few uncharacteristic records, a fitting way for an album about how isolated it was for her to spend a decade drifting in and out of the mainstream. Guests up Brat and… They were seemingly recruited with this sense of loneliness in mind: 1975's Matty Healy, Grande, Eilish and Bb Trickz are lightning rods forever noted for their sharp tongues, fat mouths and tabloid provocations. Bladee and Yung Lean create an aesthetic of alienation. Justin Vernon is indie music's most enduring avatar of loneliness. Lorde and Eilish spent their teenage years under public and media scrutiny and scrutiny.
None of these artists have traveled the exact path of Charli, but all, in their own way, have had to calculate their own stardom, their place in the industry, and the choice to chase easy success or follow their muse. down the rabbit hole. Instead of trying fruitlessly to encourage relatability to her audience – who will never be as rich, famous or exposed as she is – Charli writes with surgical specificity, a welcome change from the trite, patronizing atmosphere of I'm Just Like You which has become de rigueur recently. The flip side, of course, is that these songs sometimes veer toward one-percenter solipsism (“It's a knife when you're so pretty, they think it must be fake”) but feel honest in their combinations of silliness and despair .
