The year is 2085, you’ve just gotten out of your 16-hour shift at the oxygen factory and you have a measly 40,000 lunar cycles till your retirement. You sit down at the dinner table and smile as your child walks up to you and asks: “Poppop what was the summer of 2024 like?”
Memories flood of the luxuries you took for granted clean air, lack of aliens, and the state of California and the Pacific Ocean being separate entities, but they fail to truly capture that moment.
Finally, after some thought you remember: “Ah that was the Brat summer.”
Truly nothing has dominated the past three months like “Brat,” the 6th studio album by avant-garde pop diva Charli XCX.
Released on June 7 the album has had an ironclad grip on not only music discourse but also the general public, from TikTok dance to Presidential endorsements. This overwhelming presence has led to the term “Brat summer” entering the zeitgeist.
“You’re just that girl who’s like a little messy likes to party … like maybe has a breakdown but parties through it,” said Charli in a video posted to her TikTok on July 1 that dissected the meaning of “Brat.” “It’s very honest, it’s very blunt, also a little volatile.”
This explanation can be felt in the music of the album most obviously in the song “360” and its subsequent remix “365.” Both exude an apologetic “honest” mean-girl aura featuring lyrics that see Charli placing herself as the muse of any listener “I’m your favorite reference baby”.
This also goes for “Von Dutch” the lead single for the album that relishes being the focus of drama and gossip or the song “Girl, so Confusing” featuring Lorde which sees Charli mining her own personal drama with Lorde on a track. Both of these tracks are meant to embody the messiness inherent to the “Brat” concept.
Now not every song off “Brat” is about partying through the complex emotions we’re besieged by in daily life, some of them are about generational trauma.
“Apple” a deep cut off the album that lyrically references the age-old adage “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” is a surprisingly massive hit on TikTok, with nearly 25 million videos using the audio, following the creation of dance created by Kelly Heyers.
“I basically woke up, stood in front of a mirror and took everything from the lyrics,” said Heyers in an interview with The Guardian.
She praised the Brat ethos which she called “unpolished.”
“To me, brat summer means not giving a [expletive], but also means being kind,” Heyers added.
Music alone hasn’t made Brat into the juggernaut it is, the cover also helped pave its way to meme status.
The cover features the title of the album in low-res font on a nuclear waste green background. It’s immediately eye-catching in a simple and blunt way just like the music.
“The fact that people are like, ‘I could have made this in five minutes,’ and the fact that my response is, ‘Well, yeah, but you didn’t’” Charli told Vogue on Feb. 29.
This core piece of the Brat iconography spread wide and far including to some surprising places, when President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race the official campaign account for Biden and Harris on X changed to simply Kamala HQ.
This change also featured a new banner that featured a riff on the Brat cover with the name of the account. This was soon followed up by an official endorsement from Charli in a tweet: “Kamala IS brat”.
Has Kamala ever heard Brat?
The world may never know. Would she approve of the lyrical content? Barring some massive changes to drug policy, likely not. But like all great art, Brat is in the eye of the beholder.
