How Much Charli XCX Is Too Much Charli XCX?

Yes, the current Brat arena tour is a well-earned victory lap. But because we’re talking about Charli XCX, one of the most self-aware pop stars of the last 15 years, it’s also more than a victory lap. It’s an interrogation of what a victory lap can mean in the culture at large. It’s a show that both contemplates and shakes its ass at the idea of oversaturation, of something being played out. The tour—which hit Brooklyn’s Barclays Center last night, the first of four sold-out dates there—is mostly a fun dance party and an excuse to wave your hands around alongside some black-and-lime-clad friends, but it’s also sort of sad. “It’s really hard to let go of Brat and let go of this thing that is so inherently me and become my entire life,” Charli confessed in a recent TikTok video. “I kind of want it to go on and on and on.” 

Of course, it can’t keep going. She knows that; we know that. And therein lies the show’s tension. It tries to force Charli and her audience to live in the beautifully messy universe she created for just an hour and a half longer. To disregard the fact that Brat summer is already a couple of seasons in the rearview. To forget the context that became entwined with this phenomenon: that brief moment of excitement  surrounding “kamala IS brat,” the dashed hopes of a woman in the White House, the normalization of the manosphere, and the wretched notifications that now poison our phones every hour. For a workaholic like Charli, it’s also probably difficult to press pause on all the “what’s next?!” questions pinging around her brain, to put the inevitable future on hold. All of this tension between what was, what is, and what will be was perfectly reflected in the song that pumped from the speakers right before Charli took the stage: the Verve’s eternal “Bittersweet Symphony,” which turns the realities of our cursed human condition into a chest-beating anthem to end all anthems.

Charli’s got a few of those types of tracks in her arsenal now, too. There’s “Apple,” perhaps the most tortured pop song to ever get its own shiny, happy, internet-conquering dance (“This one goes out to anyone who’s experienced generational trauma!” Charli half-joked last night as an introduction). And the paranoid, bloodletting “Sympathy Is a Knife,” which she performed while hitting a few incredible rock-star poses (if Charli’s quest to stretch Brat out evermore involves a live album or film, this song will most definitely be a huge highlight). There’s also the “Girl, So Confusing (Remix),” where Charli and Lorde admit their feminist failings only to build each other back up even stronger. When Charli played New York City last year—as part of her Sweat tour with Troye Sivan, when the Brat craze was close to its peak—Lorde made a surprise appearance, and the whole arena lost its collective shit. We know Lorde has been spending time in the city as of late, but she wasn’t at Barclays last night. Instead, the crowd happily sang along with her verse, as Charli strutted the down runway jutting out from the stage. I know Lorde can’t just show up at every Charli gig in New York, but her absence temporarily reminded me that this night was not quite as special as that other night eight months ago. For a moment, it broke the fantasy of infinite, invincible Brat.

During the Sweat tour, Charli concentrated almost exclusively on Brat’s biggest bangers, but this solo show gave her more room to show off her emotional range. Several blistering tracks were followed by brief ambient interludes—the kind of take-a-breath pauses you might find on an album by her fiancé George Daniel’s band, the 1975—that flowed into heartrending ballads like “I Might Say Something Stupid” and her Sophie tribute, “So I.” The dissonance could be jarring, but it also felt true to the Brat experience, where the existential hangover is a key counterbalance to the “bumpin’ that” high. During “So I,” Charli dipped into the song’s A. G. Cook remix toward the end and sang, “Now I wanna think about all the good times.” The line reminded me of her nostalgic streak, how she’s constantly looking back amid music that sounds so forward. This theme is typified by “Rewind,” the Brat track where she dreams of escaping into her pre-fame past. “I used to never think about Billboard/But now I’ve started thinkin’ again,” she sang last night. “Wonderin’ ’bout whether I think I deserve commercial success.” Remember: She wrote that song before she had a Top 5 album in America and before she was able to go on a sold-out arena tour. If she was fretting over whether she thought she deserved success then, imagine what she feels like now. Maybe the accolades have quelled that anxious part of her mind. Or maybe her everlasting Brat summer represents a new idealized past for her to rewind back to forever.

Last night, the song that best encapsulated Brat’s emotional thrust was not even from Brat. “Party 4 U” was originally released on Charli’s pandemic album, 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now, but it just entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the first time following a resurgence on TikTok. I’ve always loved this song, and seeing people getting emo to it, putting it behind famous tearjerking scenes from movies, and making their cat’s belly wiggle to its bass has given me tremendous joy over the last few weeks. While watching one TikTok that paired the song with the show Girls, I realized something: “Party 4 U” is the “Dancing on My Own” of the 2020s. Just like that 2010 Robyn classic (which was famously featured on Girls), this is classic crying-in-the-club fare, about making your own party even if you really want to be partying with someone else. A few days after this thought popped into my head, the TikTok gods served me this video of a musician named Ashley Mehta blending the two songs together. It’s awesome.

At Barclays Center, Charli performed “Party 4 U” in front of a huge backdrop with the word “PARTY” on it while tossing around a glowing rope that hung from the upper reaches of the venue. It was an arresting visual, but it also highlighted how she was completely alone onstage, without anyone there to catch the rope. It made me realize: The Brat arena show is a particularly lonely pop spectacle; the only other person on stage throughout the night was a guy manning a Steadicam to capture all of Charli’s hair flips and cocked eyebrows for the big screen. No band. No dancers. The song’s breakdown features Charli’s Auto-Tuned voice stacked and harmonized—a robot barbershop quartet of one. At the show, everyone sang along, bringing their own memories, hopes, and disappointments to the party. We were all alone, together. I didn’t want it to stop either.