Over the past month, an indiscernible beat has been thumping through London. You can hear it rattling between a pair of AirPods on the bus, or emanating from a nearby house party in the still of a summer evening. Social channels are overrun with slime green squares. Arial appears to have become the only font worth using. Waistlines are lower, hemlines are higher. The big Brat summer is all around us, but what even is it?
Manufactured by the mastermind that is Charli XCX, aka Charlotte Aitchison, Brat is technically just a studio album like any other. Released on June 7, it marks the Start Hill native’s sixth studio album since she burst onto the scene with her debut True Romance in 2013. In its most basic form, Brat is an LP made up of 15 songs, alongside a deluxe edition, entitled “Brat and it's the same but there’s three more songs so it's not”.
The songs are out-and-out club bangers, including one self descriptive track “Club Classics”, where Charli insists “When I go to the club I want to hear those club classics.” Those club classics are of course: her own music (“Yeah, I wanna dance to me”). The lyrics traverse being a 31-year-old party girl, while maintaining the overly specific openness of an Instagram close friends story.
Visually, Brat is sleazy but well put together, like a good outfit at the end of a big night. During this era, Charli has donned white vests and black tights (actual pants optional), oversized slogan tees and sunglasses, or worn purses on stage a la PinkPantheress. All in all it’s aggressively 2024 and still vaguely y2k (because realistically that resurgence isn’t going to die anytime soon).
But it’s not all about the outfits, or even the music, or even Charli herself. Brat has become bigger than perhaps even Charli intended. It has become an aesthetic, a mindset, a theology. It even has the potential to become a powerful political tool, with Charli declaring US Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris “so brat” when her campaign was announced this weekend.
Just as Megan Thee Stallion captured the zeitgeist perfectly when she coined “Hot Girl Summer” in 2019, Charli XCX has captured a moment with Brat. How?
“The timing of it is really important,” says senior foresight analyst Marta Indeka, who is based at the trend forecasting agency The Future Laboratory. “Last year, we really had that explosion of girlhood. There was Barbiecore and the summer of Taylor Swift’s first blockbuster concerts. But now we’re starting to see a new facet of that, in a more nuanced way.”
Indeka highlights the burgeoning trend last year of “feral girl summer”, which emerged as a response to the four-year-long reign of hot girl summer, a drought which may have helped to usher in the Brat era. “Hot girl summer, there’s expectations attached to that label,” Indeka says, “but Brat summer is more freeing.” She notes that Brat summer can be interpreted “however you want,” and that this hyper-personalisation is exactly why it’s so successful.
And yes, it’s also a masterclass in marketing. “The whole campaign is just so conducive for UGC [user generated content] and cultural adoption,” Indeka says. “Having a signature colour and font is a very easy marketing technique [...] ad the meme-ability and virality of it is what really made it blow up.”
But it's also distinctly authentic: Charli has been discussing her desire to make music that “people want to party to” or that she would “want to hear in a club” in nearly every interview she’s done for the past five years. “It works because it rings true,” says Indeka, “because otherwise it wouldn’t be that relatable, that sticky. It fits the zeitgeist perfectly.”
she’s having a brat summer pic.twitter.com/Hlw1piZcWH
— hannah (@dumbandfunn) June 24, 2024
It’s also the first piece of club-centric media that’s gone viral in a long time. Discussions around the recent lack of traditional “club bangers” that dominated the early 2000s have been raging on music message boards for years and, as Indeka puts it, “there was a gap to be filled there.”
Not to mention the instant virality of calling out another pop girl on a track (Charli waxes about her confusing music industry relationship with Lorde on Girl, So Confusing) only to feature her on the remix two weeks later. And Lorde doesn’t just feature, she directly addresses the “beef” in a soul-baring slew of lyrics that feel almost too raw to buss it down to. But we still will, because it’s a big Brat summer.
Ultimately, Brat is about hedonism, which tends to have a moment during the summer anyway, even more so post-Covid, and amid a financial crisis.
But it’s also more than big sunglasses and slogan tees and sweat — it’s about having a whole heartedly good time, for you, not for anyone else. “It’s about having a healthy balance of hedonism, going out and craving real life experiences that are a bit raw, a bit messy, but also acknowledging that it can fit into a wholesome lifestyle,” says Indeka. So there you have it. Now go and enjoy your big Brat summer.
