Variety: Jem Aswad's Top 10 Albums of 2024

Forget song of the summer—2024’s undisputed album of the summer (northern hemisphere version) arrived in early June with a slime-green album cover and wall-to-wall bangers that would launch Charli xcx’s career to stratospheric new heights. (Cue news anchors worldwide grappling with the sociopolitical ramifications of “being brat.”) For years, the self-directed English artist enjoyed a reputation buzzier than “cult favorite” yet not quite “main pop girl,” but with the release of her sixth studio album, she hadn’t just captured the zeitgeist—she’d become it. If you didn’t see it coming, well, neither did Charli. “I really was preparing for this album to be for my fanbase only, and not really break outside the walls of that at all,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe with typical candor. Nevertheless, she presented the concept to her label with a manifesto she’d written—things she’d wanted to say since 2016’s paradigm-shifting *Vroom Vroom* EP. “‘On this record there’s going to be no traditional radio songs, because we don’t live in that world now,’” she told them. “This fanbase I have built is so hungry for me and my peers and our slightly-left world of pop/dance music—they’re hungry for us to succeed. That doesn’t mean that we have to do any pandering to any other side of the industry. We just have to do it for them because they’ve championed us for so long, and that’s all we need to light a fire.” Not content to rest while that fire’s still burning, Charli’s also committed to single-handedly keeping the remix industry afloat. You could call the full-length remix album yet another shrewd marketing move, though the project was in the works well before *BRAT* blew up. Here, a cross-generational who’s who of cool kids mingles in the smoking section of fall’s most exclusive party, where NYC garage-rock legends rub elbows with genuine pop divas and mystical Swedish rappers. And for all *BRAT*’s messy rawness regarding the complications of being a woman in the industry, the remix album brings together a slick-talking Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande at her glitchiest, Robyn flexing her ’90s bona fides, Tinashe basking in her own long-awaited shine, and naturally, the Lorde remix that broke the internet. Brat summer is dead. Long live brat summer!

Jamie Smith’s 2015 debut solo album *In Colour* set the tone for an entire decade of left-of-center electronic music, but his long-awaited follow-up harbors zero pretension when it comes to trend-watching. Nine years later, *In Waves* sets its sights on the dance floor with glorious aplomb, the perfect complement to a string of body-moving singles that the iconic British producer has released in the preceding year and a half. “The collaboration element was helping me push things forward without having to think too much about myself on my own,” Smith tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. From there, the rest of *In Waves* came together in quick succession—and, suitably, the record’s rowdy and in-a-crowd feel was largely inspired by the solitude of the lockdown era, as well as dreams of how it would feel to play big tunes for huge audiences again. “I was starting to get excited about the idea of playing shows again,” Smith says. The guest list for this party is overflowing: Along with a practical reunion of his main outfit The xx on the dreamy “Waited All Night,” house music auteur and recent Beyoncé collaborator Honey Dijon lends her distinctive incantations to the squelch of “Baddy on the Floor,” while experimental-leaning vocalists Kelsey Lu and Panda Bear throw in on the soul-streaked and woozy “Dafodil.” But at the center of *In Waves* is a truly assured sense of confidence from Smith, who’s returned here with a set of club-ready cuts that’s truly crowd-pleasing—all without losing the distinctive touch that’s brought him so much deserved acclaim to this point. “One of the most inspiring things is to go out clubbing,” he says. “And I think you can have quite profound thoughts even in an altered state on the dance floor.”

If there were any remaining doubts as to hip-hop’s MVP, consider the decision stamped: Kendrick Lamar officially won 2024. There were whispers that Compton’s finest was working on an album in the wake of his feud with Drake, a once-in-a-generation beef that kept jaws dropped for months. (Perhaps you’ve heard of a little song called “Not Like Us,” an immediate entry into the canon of all-time great diss tracks.) After a sold-out celebration at the Kia Forum, an armful of Grammy nods and streaming records, and the headlining slot at next year’s Super Bowl, Lamar ties up his biggest year yet with a bow with his sixth album, *GNX*, the most legitimately surprising surprise drop since *BEYONCÉ* in 2013. Named for his beloved classic Buick, *GNX* finds Kendrick wielding a hatchet he’s by no means ready to bury, still channeling this summer’s cranked-to-11 energy. On “wacced out murals,” he’s riding around listening to Anita Baker, plotting on several downfalls: “It used to be fuck that n\*\*\*a, but now it’s plural/Fuck everybody, that’s on my body.” (Yes, there’s a nod to his Super Bowl drama with Lil Wayne.) If you’ve been holding your breath for Jack Antonoff to link with Mustard, wait no more—the seemingly odd couple share production credits on multiple tracks, the explosive “tv off” among them. Still, K.Dot keeps you guessing: It’s not quite 12 tracks of straight venom over world-conquering West Coast beats. SZA helps cool things down on the Luther Vandross-sampling “luther,” while Lamar snatches back a borrowed title on “heart pt. 6” to remember the early days of TDE: “Grinding with my brothers, it was us against them, no one above us/Bless our hearts.” He cycles through past lives over a flip of 2Pac’s “Made N\*\*\*\*z” on “reincarnated” before getting real with his father about war, peace, addiction, and ego death, and on “man at the garden,” he outlines his qualifications for the position of GOAT. Here’s another bullet point to add to that CV: On *GNX*, Lamar still surprises while giving the people exactly what they want.

As someone who invited fame and courted infamy, first with inflammatory albums like *Wolf* and later with his flamboyant fashion sense via GOLF WANG, Tyler Okonma is less knowable than most stars in the music world. While most celebrities of his caliber and notoriety either curate their public lives to near-plasticized extremes or become defined by tabloid exploits, the erstwhile Odd Futurian chiefly shares what he cares to via his art and the occasional yet ever-quotable interview. As his Tyler, The Creator albums pivoted away from persona-building and toward personal narrative, as on the acclaimed *IGOR* and *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, his mystique grew grandiose, with the undesirable side effect of greater speculation. The impact of fan fixation plays no small part on *CHROMAKOPIA*, his seventh studio album and first in more than three years. Reacting to the weirdness, opening track “St. Chroma” finds Tyler literally whispering the details of his upbringing, while lead single “Noid” more directly rages against outsiders who overstep both online and offline. As on his prior efforts, character work plays its part, particularly on “I Killed You” and the two-hander “Hey Jane.” Yet the veil between truth and fiction feels thinner than ever on family-oriented cuts like “Like Him” and “Tomorrow.” Lest things get too damn serious, Tyler provocatively leans into sexual proclivities on “Judge Judy” and “Rah Tah Tah,” both of which should satisfy those who’ve been around since the *Goblin* days. When monologue no longer suits, he calls upon others in the greater hip-hop pantheon. GloRilla, Lil Wayne, and Sexyy Red all bring their star power to “Sticky,” a bombastic number that evolves into a Young Buck interpolation. A kindred spirit, it seems, Doechii does the most on “Balloon,” amplifying Tyler’s energy with her boisterous and profane bars. Its title essentially distillable to “an abundance of color,” *CHROMAKOPIA* showcases several variants of Tyler’s artistry. Generally disinclined to cede the producer’s chair to anyone else, he and longtime studio cohort Vic Wainstein execute a musical vision that encompasses sounds as wide-ranging as jazz fusion and Zamrock. His influences worn on stylishly cuffed sleeves, Neptunes echoes ring loudly on the introspective “Darling, I” while retro R&B vibes swaddle the soapbox on “Take Your Mask Off.”

Throughout Donald Glover’s idiosyncratic entertainment career, Childish Gambino has served as a vessel for his musical endeavors. The malleability of that moniker provided the right fit for his restless creative spirit, via the wry alt-rap adventures of *Camp* and *Because the Internet* and subsequently through the gripping P-Funk-meets-BLM expressions of *“Awaken, My Love!”* Few, if any, artists of his generation could make television as profound and unique as the critically acclaimed *Atlanta* while also charting Billboard hits as diverse as “Redbone” and “This Is America.” But everything has its limit. “I\'m not trying to be for anybody anymore,” Glover tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe. “It\'s too much work. I have to pick up the kids. I have to make chia seed pudding so they have something to eat in the morning.” So it’s with a certain sadness for his fans across mediums that Glover has declared *Bando Stone and the New World* the last Childish Gambino album. The ostensible soundtrack to a feature-length movie of the same name, the hour-long project includes snippets of dialogue that hint at the film’s apocalyptic subject matter. The fact that the soundtrack is preceding the actual film is part of Glover’s strategy: He wants listeners to work to figure out what they’re listening to. “The soundtrack forces the audience to participate in a way that I don\'t feel like most things force you to participate,” he says. “It forces you to have an imagination. I already see people being like, \'This is very cinematic, this must be the part that... This feels like a credit sequence.\' A lot of stuff feels flat because it\'s not asking you to participate. Art used to be you had to participate on some level and have some sort of thought process on it. You can\'t just be like, \'Oh, this is mid.\'” Even without the benefit of the full visuals, these 17 tracks make for a satisfying swan song that synthesizes what came before with fresher ideas gleaned from the threshold of finality. From the industrial dancehall clatter of “H3@Rt$ W3re M3@Nt T0 F7¥” to the post-EDM edge of “A Place Where Love Goes,” he borrows from the zeitgeist in order to tell a story that’s all his own. That process makes *Bando Stone* a more rare and diverse effort, merging multiple styles into an oddly cohesive listening experience. “Lithonia” applies soaring guitar and dramatic keys to the single’s self-realizations, while the genuinely sentimental “Real Love” liberally mixes subtly squelching synths with breezy breaks. Elsewhere, he pops out and shows his haters what’s what with the punchline-laden bars of “Talk My Shit,” keeping that same energy on the power-pop bop “Running Around.” To Glover, this stylistic eclecticism is faithful to how he thinks people experience their lives. “Depending on what you want or where you want to go, you\'ll listen to Sade or you\'ll listen to Nine Inch Nails,” he says. “They offer something, and I feel like with more access to things, you can offer a more holistic view of life or just what we\'re all going through.” Glover’s personal life understandably bleeds into the mix, marked most poignantly by the presence of his son Legend on the tender duet “Can You Feel Me.” That meaningful guest appearance exists alongside collaborations with other noteworthy guests culled largely from the hip-hop and R&B world, such as Flo Milli, Fousheé, and Yeat, the latter of whom Glover says he was “super impressed with.” With the help of Amaarae and Jorja Smith, he makes a meaningful case for love on the standout cut “In the Night.” Ultimately, Glover believes he’s wrapped up this part of his life on his own terms, even if there’s some ambiguity. “I remember seeing the ending of *The Sopranos* and being like, ‘I feel very content.’ And I know some people didn\'t feel that way, but I remember watching it. It\'s like, ‘Man, I have to make something that makes people okay with an ending like that.’”

On previous album covers for Lorely Rodriguez’s alt-pop project Empress Of, the musician assumed a straightforward pose, casually stunting if not smiling. For the cover of her fourth album, which shares a cheeky title with the awards season campaign slogan, the Honduran American singer-producer throws her hair back as she straddles a shooting star, Los Angeles sprawled out behind her. She’s described it as something of a Hollywood album in all its sordid glam; the aching title track reflects on the end of a relationship with a showbiz scenester (“You wrote the script; your words, not mine”). That sheen of glitzy fantasy shimmers gently over Rodriguez’s club-ready explorations on love’s fleeting nature, running the gamut between heartbreak and hedonism and switching seamlessly between Spanish and English. She longs for “*un hombre femenine, un latine, que baile pa\' mi y solo pa\' mi*” on thumping house jam “Femenine,” wonders about the owner of an unfamiliar pair of earrings on infidelity banger “Lorelei,” and finds redemption in a wild night out on “Cura.” Rodriguez’s lyricism is at times abstract and poetic (“The rumors there, the mirror shows, the cards don’t lie, the boys all know—what type of girl am I?”) and at others sharply seductive (“*Yo soy fácil, fácil de comer, fácil de amar*”). The small handful of guests are like-minded in their boundary-pushing, occasionally messy avant-pop: Rina Sawayama on the love-drunk “Kiss Me” and fellow Angelenos MUNA on the searching “What’s Love.”

IDLES’ fifth album is a collection of love songs. For singer Joe Talbot, it couldn’t be anything else. “At the time of writing this album, I was quite lost,” he tells Apple Music. “Not musically, it was a beautiful time for music. But emotionally, my nervous system needed organizing, and I needed to sort my shit out. So I did. That came from me realizing that I needed love in my life, and that I had sometimes lost my narrative in the art, which is that love is all I’ve ever sung about.” From a band wearied by other people’s attempts to pin narrow labels like “punk” or “political” to their expansive, thoughtful music, that’s as concise a summary as you’ll get. It’s also an accurate one. The Bristol five-piece’s music has always viewed the world with an empathetic eye, processing the human effects and impulses around subjects as varied as grief, immigration, kindness, toxic masculinity, and anxiety. And on their fourth album, 2021’s *CRAWLER*, the aggression and sinew of earlier songs gave way to more space and restraint as Talbot turned inward to reckon with his experiences with addiction. For *TANGK*, that experimentation continued while the band’s initial ideas were developed with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich in London during late 2022, before the record was completed with *CRAWLER* co-producer Kenny Beats joining the team to record in the south of France. They’ve emerged with an album where an Afrobeat rhythm played out on an obscure drum machine (“Grace”) or a gentle piano melody recorded on an iPhone (“A Gospel”) hit with as much impact as a gale-force guitar riff (“Gift Horse”). Exploring the thrills and the scars of love in multiple forms, Talbot leans ever more into singing over firebrand fury. “I’ve got a kid now, and part of my learning is to have empathy when I parent,” he says. “And with that comes delicacy. To use empathy is a delicate and graceful act. And that’s coming out in my art, because I’m also being delicate and graceful with myself, forgiving myself, and giving myself time to learn. I don’t want to lie.” Discover more with Talbot’s track-by-track guide to *TANGK*. **“IDEA 01”** “It was the first thing \[guitarist and co-producer Mark\] Bowen worked on, and Bowen, being the egotistical maniac that he is, called it ‘IDEA 01’ because he forgot that it was actually idea seven. But, bless him, he does like attention. But, yes, it was the first song that was written in Nigel’s studio. Bowen sat at the piano and started playing, and it was beautiful. ‘IDEA 01’ is different vignettes around old friends that I haven’t seen since Devon \[where Talbot grew up\], and the relationships I had with them and their families, and how crazy certain people’s families are. Bowen’s beautiful piano part reminded me of this song we wrote on the last album, ‘Kelechi.’ Kelechi was a good friend of mine who sadly passed away, and I hadn’t seen him since I waved him off to move to Manchester with his family. I just had this feeling I was never going to see him again. Maybe I’m writing that in my head now, but he was a beautiful, beautiful man. I loved him. I think maybe if we were still friends, part of me could have helped him, but that’s, again, fantasy I think.” **“Gift Horse”** “I was trying to get this disco thing going, so I gave Jon \[Beavis, drummer\] a bunch of disco beats to work on. And Dev \[bassist Adam Devonshire\] is bang into The Rapture and !!! and LCD Soundsystem, and he turned out that bassline real quick. I wrote a song around it, and it felt great. It was what my intentions of the album were: to make people dance and not think, because love is a very complex thing that doesn’t need to be thought. It can just be acted, and worked on, and danced with. I just wanted to make people move, and get that physicality of the live experience in people’s bones. I had this concept of a gift horse as a theme of a song, and it sang to me. I like that grotesque phrase, ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth.’ It’s about my daughter, and I’m very grateful for her, and our relationship, and I wanted to write a beast of a tune around her.” **“POP POP POP”** “I read \[‘freudenfreude’\] online somewhere. It was like, words that don’t exist that should exist. Schadenfreude is such a dark thing, to enjoy other people’s misery, so the idea of someone enjoying someone else’s joy is great. Being a parent, you suddenly are entwined with someone else’s joys and lows. I love seeing her dance, and have a good time, and grow as a person, and learn, so I wanted to write a song about it.” **“Roy”** “It’s an allegorical story that sums up a lot of my behavior towards my partners over a 15-year period where I was in a cycle of absolute worship and then fear, jealousy and assholery. I wanted to dedicate it to my girlfriend, who I call Roy. She’s not called Roy. I wanted it to be about the idea of a man who is in love and then his fears take over, and he starts acting like a prick to push that person away. Then he wakes up in the morning with a horrible hangover, realizing what he’s done, and he apologizes. He is then forgiven in the chorus, and rejoicing ensues.” **“A Gospel”** “It’s a reflection on breakups, which I think are a learning curve. I think all my exes deserve a medal, and they’ve taught me a lot. It’s really a tender moment of a dream I used to have, then \[it\] dances between different tiny memories, tiny vignettes of what happened before, and me just giving a nod to those moments and saying goodbye, which is beautiful. No heartbreak, really. I’ve been through the heartbreak now. It’s just me smiling and being like, ‘Yeah, you were right. Thank you very much.’” **“Dancer” (with LCD Soundsystem)** “The best form of dance is to express yourself freely within a group who are also expressing themselves freely, the true embodiment of communion. The last time I had this sense of euphoria from that was an Oh Sees gig at the \[Sala\] Apolo in Barcelona. I closed my eyes and let the mosh push me from one side of the room to the other and back. I didn’t open my eyes once, I just smiled and was carried by this organism of beautiful rage. Dancing’s a really big part of my personality. I love it. My mum always danced. Even in her most ill days \[Talbot’s mother passed away during the recording of 2017 debut *Brutalism*\], she would always get up and dance, and enjoy herself. I dance with my daughter every day that I have her. I think it’s magic and important.” **“Grace”** “It all came out of nowhere. I had this beat in mind for a while—I was thinking of an aggro Afrobeat kind of track. But it didn’t come out like that. It came out like what happens when Nigel Godrich gets his hands on your Afrobeat stuff. I asked Nigel to make the beat, and he chose the LinnDrum \[’80s drum machine\]. The LinnDrum changes the sound of a beat, the tone of a drum, the cadence of a beat, it changed the beat completely. It’s a very, very delicate thing, a beat. It sounded like a different song to me. It sounded amazing. And that’s where the bassline came from. And then that’s where the vocals came from. It felt a bit uneasy for a long time because it came out of nowhere. Me and Bowen were like, ‘Is this right? Is this complete?’ I think it just has to feel like you, like it is part of you and what you mean at the moment, that’s all. An album’s an episode of where you’re at in the world in that point in time.” **“Hall & Oates”** “I wanted to write a glam-rock pounder about falling in love with your boys. My ex and I used to joke about this thing where you make love to someone for the first time, and then the next day, you’re walking on air, and it feels like Hall & Oates is playing. The birds are singing, you’re bouncing around and everything’s great. I wanted to use that analogy for when you make friends with someone for the first time, and they make you feel good, lighter, stronger, excited to see them again. And that’s what happened in lockdown: I made friends with \[Bristol-based singer-songwriter\] Willie J Healey and my mate Ben, and we went on bike rides whenever we could, getting out and feeling good post-lockdown. It gave me a sense of purpose again. It felt like I was falling in love.” **“Jungle”** “I was trying to write a jungle tune for ages. The guitar line was a jungle bassline that I had but it just never fit what we were writing. And then Bowen started playing the chords on the guitar and it transformed it into something completely different. It completely revitalized what I’d been dragging through the mud for five years. Bowen made it IDLES, made it real, made it believable, made it beautiful. And then it reminded me of getting nicked, so I wrote a song about different times that I’ve been in trouble.” **“Gratitude”** “This was a real struggle. Bowen was really obsessed about doing interesting counts with the beats. I just wanted to make people dance and create infectious beats. We were coming from very different angles, but we loved this song that Bowen had made. I was like, ‘I get it, Bowen. This is insane. I love it, but I can’t get it.’ We hung on to it for ages, and then Nigel really helped us out, he created spaces and bits here and there by turning things down and moving everything slightly. Then Kenny helped me out, and got rid of the stupid counts, I think, and helped me write it on a 4/4 beat. And then they changed it back. I just come in in weird places. Everyone chipped in, because everyone believed in the song.” **“Monolith”** “I was fascinated by films where four or five notes are repeated throughout and create this monolithic motif. There’s a sense of continuity but the mood changes depending on certain things like tone and instruments. I wanted to do that over a song, and we got our friend Colin \[Webster\] from \[London noise rock unit\] Sex Swing to do the sax, we did it on different instruments that Nigel had. Nigel went away and basically put it all through the hollow-body bass. It reminded me of a documentary from a series called *The Blues* that Martin Scorsese curated. *The Soul of a Man* \[directed by Wim Wenders\] is about a song \[Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was the Night’\] getting sent into space. If any aliens get this capsule, they’ll hear this song being played from a blues artist. It created a really beautiful and deep picture in my mind. It felt like this monolith drifting in the ether. I started singing a blues riff behind it, a Skip James kind of thing. I think it’s a beautiful way to finish the album—us drifting in the ether.”

Some two years after the sublime *Candydrip*, Lucky Daye ensures that his third studio album is required listening for R&B fans and lovers everywhere. Despite the seeming coldness of its title, *Algorithm* allures with its series of sensual come-ons and pillow-talk confessions. The carnal delights depicted on “Top” feel downright palpable thanks to the singer’s earnest and eager delivery, a move that proves equally efficient on relatively more abstract cuts like the title track. A standout swirling with circular rhythms and squelchy bass, “Think Different” makes an assertive plea for cuffing in order to break an unfulfilling cycle of one-night stands. You can hear how much he’s enjoying himself on the blues-inflected novelty “Mary,” a steamy entry in the canon of lothario lore. At the same time, he’s also coming to understand the existential terror of being alone, particularly via “That’s You.” On the guest front, Teddy Swims adds his countrified soul-pop seasoning to the vulnerable duet “Blame,” while RAYE nudges Daye closer to commitment on the tender “Paralyzed.”

The White Stripes were nothing if not a formal exercise in exploring the possibilities of self-imposed limitation—in instrumentation, in color scheme, in verifiable biographical information. Since the duo’s dissolution in 2011, Jack White has continued playing with form (and color schemes), from the just-one-of-the-boys-in-the-band vibes of The Raconteurs to 2022’s sonically experimental *Fear of the Dawn* and its more restrained companion *Entering Heaven Alive*. Despite—or perhaps *to* spite—those who longed for a simpler, noisier, more monochromatic time, White tinkered away. The rollout for *No Name*, White’s sixth solo album, was characteristically mischievous: It first appeared as a white-label LP given away at Third Man Records before being posted online without song titles, sparking an excitement that felt fresh, largely because the sound did not. Meg White is not walking through that door anytime soon, but the 13 tracks here channel the unadorned, wild-eyed ferocity of the band that made him famous more efficiently and consistently than anything he’s done since. There’s plenty of swagger from top to bottom, but most of all there’s *hooks*: big, fat, noisy guitars played in the catchiest combinations possible. “That’s How I’m Feeling” may not relieve “Seven Nation Army” of its ubiquity anytime soon, but it is a ready-made capital-A anthem with a euphoric jump-scare chorus that sticks on first listen and doesn’t get unstuck. “Bless Yourself,” “Tonight (Was a Long Time Ago),” and “Number One With a Bullet” are just as infectious, while “Bombing Out” may be the fastest, heaviest thing White has ever put out in any of his many guises. The casualness of it all is a flex—as meticulous and exacting as White can be, *No Name*’s modest arrival is a reminder of how easily he could have kept churning out earworm White Stripes songs. Good for him that he didn’t want to; good for us that he does now.

Whether singing in Spanish or in English, Kali Uchis continually proves herself to be a versatile performer. Following 2020’s *Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios)* and its hit single “telepatía,” the Colombian American singer eventually boasted that she had two more albums, one in each language, more or less at the ready, the first being 2023’s soulful *Red Moon in Venus* and the next being *ORQUÍDEAS*. With lyrics primarily (though not exclusively) in Spanish, she delivers an exquisite pop-wise R&B set here, one replete with clubby highs and balladic depth. The dance floor is well served with cuts like “Me Pongo Loca” and “Pensamientos Intrusivos,” her ethereal vocals elevating them further. The collaborations reflect her journey as well as her status, as she links with superstar KAROL G on the polished perreo throwback “Labios Mordidos” and música mexicana sensation Peso Pluma for the romantic duet “Igual Que Un Ángel.” On “Muñekita,” she bridges her two worlds with the aid of Dominican dynamo El Alfa and City Girls rapper JT, who combine to produce an irresistible dembow moment.

It’s no surprise that “PARTYGIRL” is the name Charli xcx adopted for the DJ nights she put on in support of *BRAT*. It’s kind of her brand anyway, but on her sixth studio album, the British pop star is reveling in the trashy, sugary glitz of the club. *BRAT* is a record that brings to life the pleasure of colorful, sticky dance floors and too-sweet alcopops lingering in the back of your mouth, fizzing with volatility, possibility, and strutting vanity (“I’ll always be the one,” she sneers deliciously on the A. G. Cook- and Cirkut-produced opening track “360”). Of course, Charli xcx—real name Charlotte Aitchison—has frequently taken pleasure in delivering both self-adoring bangers and poignant self-reflection. Take her 2022 pop-girl yet often personal concept album *CRASH*, which was preceded by the diaristic approach of her excellent lockdown album *how i’m feeling now*. But here, there’s something especially tantalizing in her directness over the intoxicating fumes of hedonism. Yes, she’s having a raucous time with her cool internet It-girl friends, but a night out also means the introspection that might come to you in the midst of a party, or the insurmountable dread of the morning after. On “So I,” for example, she misses her friend and fellow musician, the brilliant SOPHIE, and lyrically nods to the late artist’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli xcx has always been shaped and inspired by SOPHIE, and you can hear the influence of her pioneering sounds in many of the vocals and textures throughout *BRAT*. Elsewhere, she’s trying to figure out if she’s connecting with a new female friend through love or jealousy on the sharp, almost Uffie-esque “Girl, so confusing,” on which Aitchison boldly skewers the inanity of “girl’s girl” feminism. She worries she’s embarrassed herself at a party on “I might say something stupid,” wishes she wasn’t so concerned about image and fame on “Rewind,” and even wonders quite candidly about whether she wants kids on the sweet sparseness of “I think about it all the time.” In short, this is big, swaggering party music, but always with an undercurrent of honesty and heart. For too long, Charli xcx has been framed as some kind of fringe underground artist, in spite of being signed to a major label and delivering a consistent run of albums and singles in the years leading up to this record. In her *BRAT* era, whether she’s exuberant and self-obsessed or sad and introspective, Charli xcx reminds us that she’s in her own lane, thriving. Or, as she puts it on “Von dutch,” “Cult classic, but I still pop.”