Last week parts of Europe got a total eclipse, or a decent partial one. Some people ignored the advice about looking directly at it and spent the rest of the day with sore eyes and the sun still burning behind their eyelids. In Summer 2024, the afterimage when you shut your eyes was a garish lime green colour. It was word of the year, it was a talking point the day Joe Biden pulled out of the 2024 US Presidential Election.
Charli@charli_xcx
kamala IS brat
12:29 AM · Jul 22, 2024 · 67.4M Views
3.67K Replies · 37.6K Reposts · 303K Likes
There was the brat generator, the album1 landing in the top three in the US, a remix album hitting #1 in the UK and three Grammys. The irony that the cover was a hedge to save money as Charli XCX was expecting a flop (she told Zane Lowe that ‘This album is not going to appeal to a lot of people’) yet the Lidl version of the album cover ate the world.
In a world with more content than eyeballs and eardrums, we are not often accustomed to anything that looks like mono-culture. Gone are the days when 25% of the country would watch a regular episode of One Foot In The Grave or ‘Allo ‘Allo because there were only four channels. Just recently people have been incredulous that a song has been number one for months and the same people who remember asking taxi drivers to switch Wet Wet Wet and Bryan Adams off because they just heard it ten minutes ago can’t quote a lyric from ‘Rein Me In’ the longest-running number one in British chart history.
The things 'everyone' talks about are usually some buzzy prestige drama that earns wall-to-wall coverage for a fortnight (White Lotus and Baby Reindeer would be prime examples) while pulling a fraction of the audience of the soaps and shows like Call the Midwife and Death In Paradise that nobody writes about. So, in that sense it was a surprise that of all things an album was the cultural hit of the summer. When did that last happen? Beyoncé’s Lemonade in 2016? I can't think of another album in the decade since that escaped being talked about as music. Brat was big. It opens with the mirror-check of ‘360’ and ends with the year-round escalation of ‘365’. A circle and a calendar as bookends carved from the same melody.
Oddly the shape of a reprise for what will surely be forever carbon dated as the most 2024 album of 2024 is a classic rock staple. Many bookending albums reprise as diminuendo - from The Dark Side of the Moon’s heartbeat fading out to the ghostly reprise of Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.
Dead shopping malls
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For most of its runtime, The Suburbs sounds like Bruce Springsteen grew up in Montreal and has never quite forgiven someone for it. Win Butler spends sixteen tracks mentally driving through his childhood in the Woodlands, Texas, chronicling cul-de-sacs and fading shopping precincts with the kind of wistful reverence that, if I’m being honest, starts to …
Sometimes though we get the opposite, Sgt Pepper’s reprise is the penultimate before handing off to ‘A Day In The Life’ but Neil Young flips from acoustic 'My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)' to the electric 'Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’ on Rust Never Sleeps and that’s the curious bedfellow for Brat’s mutating song titles. Almost the same song twice, but harder the second time around. Spinal Tap were keen on the idea that eleven is one louder than ten, and '365' obliges, +3dB up on '360', much less acoustic, and seventy seconds longer. This fits the charli xcx pattern, her closers run longer and typically slightly2 hotter. ‘365’ is the first time she’s ended on the up, literally bumpin’ that.
'365' started life as an edit producer A. G. Cook made for a small club night he and Charli were playing, built out of '360'. Cook says that as soon as they started recording her on '365', he was fixated on it being the first and last track. He liked the idea of coming full circle without being continuous, so the end would not just blend back into the beginning. He wanted the end of '365' to be "exhausting and slightly too long", so that you would go back to '360' and "the simpler times when the beat only dropped once" - the album is engineered to send you round again. Charli's account of the same decision runs alongside his. She wanted3 the record to feel cyclical, like a DJ mix.
Between those two club track bookends the album goes off asking questions about a dead friend ('So I'), a confused non-rivalry ('Girl, so confusing'), a potential pregnancy ('I think about it all the time') and after all that capital D Drama Charli ends up back where we started, inside a club track with the same melody but wearing boots4.
“When does it all end?” was a question being asked of brat summer before the leaves were brown, before the central heating went on and the spiced pumpkin lattes were at Starbucks. Pitchfork called a pivot in July, The Ringer was tapping a watch, scythe in hand in mid-August, some were over it before the nights really drew in, Charli herself called time in early September, others well after a standing eight count. But it would not go back in the box.
It was ‘365’ that would end up being used as part of Kamala Harris’ ill-fated Presidential campaign on TikTok. Then came the remix album, brat but it’s completely different but also still brat and gathering up Lorde’s guest verse in October. In 2025 the Other Stage headline at Glastonbury, PLEASE DON'T LET IT BE OVER behind her at other shows that year, an album cover that mutated four times on Spotify in 2025 and before the moment was done we had this year’s A24 mockumentary The Moment. We went round and round and round. 360 to 365 to 360 to 365 again and again like a self-perpetuating Groundhog Day, album mirroring what became the PR campaign.
Much of what we discuss at The Run Out Grooves is about landing an ending, sometimes the plane has to do a go-around.
So, we next cut to Charli at her own LIDO festival in 2025, a year after the album came out, at Victoria Park. She opens her headline set with the Shygirl ‘365’ remix segueing into ‘360’, flipping the two bookends around and letting the middle spill out. When she got to the end she finished, of course, with the Icona Pop song that landed her over a decade earlier.
Before that came 'Track 10', which Alexis Petridis called her best song in the Guardian last year. It is a demo torn apart and rebuilt, eventually becoming 2019’s Lizzo-featuring Blame It on Your Love. This is entirely consistent with her own thesis. When the remix album came out she announced on her own Instagram;
i've always had a bit of an issue with songs coming out and being cemented as one thing for eternity... i think songs are endless and have the possibility to be continuously broken down, reworked, changed, morphed, mutilated into something completely unrecognizable.
This plays well to her attitude to the rest of the LIDO setlist. ‘365’ pops up again halfway through and ‘Rewind’ gets rewound and repeated (the first time as an accident, too on the nose for anyone to invent).
Having done everything to define what having a brat summer is and what being a bit messy looks like, it is hard to argue that Charli XCX didn’t deserve her victory lap. She spent almost nothing on a cover for an album she thought would die on its arse, then ran a near-perfect campaign for a record that did what many thought wasn’t possible in the 2020s; it became something bigger than just another record.
Anyone who can do that has earned a day off. 2024 was a leap year, after all.
The album was released in early June 2024, ten years to the day after her turn on Iggy Azalea’s ‘Fancy’ was at the summit of the US Billboard charts.
‘visions’ closed her lockdown-released album, How I’m Feeling Now, with the mood falling.
In her Guardian review, Laura Snapes flags it as moving “harder into Yeezus territory”, a switch to a more industrial and harder edged style, away from the more polished and glossy versions she deployed beforehand and Kanye West had pre 2013.
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