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19:34 · 2,935 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- Brat was named album of the year by at least 27 major publications and outranked Beyonce, The Cure and Nick Cave as the best reviewed album of 2024 on Metacritic, then swept three Brit Awards and won three Grammys from seven nominations.
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- The anomaly is the format. Brat is a club record, an electronic dance album welded to mainstream pop appeal, and club records almost never break through at that scale.
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- The groundwork goes back to Essex, where Charli grew up on the abrasive sound of Ed Banger Records, uploaded dance tracks to MySpace and was playing illegal London raves by 16.
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- Her first mainstream success was invisible. She wrote I Love It, handed it to Icona Pop, watched it go seven times platinum, and stayed out of the video, the promo cycle and the credit.
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- In 2014 Fancy topped the Hot 100 for seven weeks and Boom Clap became her first solo top ten, and she then cancelled the co-headlining tour with Bleachers rather than play songs that already felt stale to her.
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- Hearing Sophie's Lemonade redirected her career. Vroom Vroom was metallic, distorted and openly synthetic, polarising at the time and later a cornerstone of hyperpop.
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- The label workaround is the most instructive move: she branded Number 1 Angel a mixtape to sidestep the industry release schedule, and when a leak killed her third album she scrapped it and built Pop 2 with A. G. Cook inside four months.
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- Crash was marketed as the sellout album and became her first UK number one, which was the point. Playing the pop game bought her the leverage to make Brat entirely on her own terms.
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- The rollout used the underground as the marketing: tracks teased at raves, cryptic posts on a private Instagram, remixes premiered during a Boiler Room set. The paradox is that the record thrived on the same machinery it appeared to reject.
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- The thesis the whole video turns on: pop survives by devouring the underground, disco and hip hop and house and hyperpop all included, and the internet has compressed that from decades into a single album cycle. Hyperpop rose, peaked and was declared dead inside ten years.
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