Brat Summer: What Actually Happened

Here is the first thing to say about brat. It is a great pop album. Charli XCX, after fifteen years of being the critically acclaimed under-performer of Atlantic Records’ pop roster, made a record that cohered at the level her previous solo work had not quite achieved. The production, from A.G. Cook and others, is tight and strange in the specific register her work has always aimed at. The writing, from Charli herself, is sharper, more autobiographical, and less hedged than on any of her earlier records. The album’s critical reception was correct on the merits.

That is not what “brat summer” was. “Brat summer” was something else, and a year on, the difference between the album and the cultural phenomenon that surrounded it is the thing I want to talk about.

What brat summer was

brat was released in June 2024. Within three weeks, “brat summer” had ossified into a specific aesthetic code: lime green, pixelated lowercase Arial, cigarettes, messy hair, the specific flatness of pre-2010 club-girl iconography, and the general cultural permission to be, in the phrase of the moment, “a little rat.”

The phenomenon moved with astonishing speed from an organic fan culture into a full marketing apparatus. By August, the US Democratic presidential campaign had co-opted the lime-green typography. Corporate brand accounts were posting lowercase Arial on the Kamala Harris campaign. Fashion houses were rushing out brat-coded collections. The music press was running “is brat summer over?” pieces while brat summer was still ostensibly going on.

What was “brat summer” actually for? Three answers:

1. It was a giving-up of the wellness-industrial regime that had dominated 2010s-era cultural performance of health and self-care. brat gave young women permission to not be aspirational.
2. It was a re-discovery of pre-sobriety club culture in a cohort too young to remember its previous iteration.
3. It was an aesthetic system loose enough that almost any brand could appropriate it, and almost any brand did.

The third item cancelled out large parts of the first two within about four weeks of the record’s release.

Charli’s year

Charli XCX herself, I should say, has handled the phenomenon with a specific intelligence. She did not, in most of her public statements during the brat run, try to arbitrate who got to be “brat” and who did not. She also, notably, did not pretend the commercial takeover was not happening. She collaborated with it, took the money, released remix editions, filmed the Kamala-adjacent moments, and kept writing about her actual life inside the songs themselves.

The second half of 2024 and the first half of 2025 have been, for Charli, a professionally useful aftermath. brat the record has done something like 2 million equivalent album sales globally as of mid-2025. The remix edition, Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat, released in October 2024, did substantial reputational work by featuring collaborators from across pop, Lorde, Billie Eilish, Troye Sivan, Robyn, Ariana Grande, that turned the record into a node for contemporary pop’s most-watched friendships.

That remix edition is, for what it is worth, the thing that converted a lot of hesitant listeners to the record proper. The Lorde track, “Girl, so confusing,” rewritten with Lorde’s own verse about the rivalry Charli had addressed to her, did more public friendship-repair-as-art than any pop collaboration of the year.

Why most of what brat inspired was bad

The larger cultural footprint of brat summer produced, across 2024 and 2025, a long list of imitators. Lower-tier pop releases chasing the brat sound. Fashion collections chasing the brat palette. Brand marketing chasing the brat copy voice. Almost all of this has been bad.

The reason is not mysterious. brat worked because it was specific, and specific work cannot be copied at scale without becoming generic. Charli’s record is about a real mid-30s woman’s real rivalries, real drug use, real ambitions, real anxieties. The songs describe specific rooms, specific thoughts, specific nights. The aesthetic that grew up around the record was built out of the surface of the specificity, the lime-green, the Arial lowercase, the cigarettes, without access to the specificity itself. Imitators got the paint and none of the walls.

This is always how it goes with genuine pop-cultural events. The original artist does specific work. The culture extracts a mood. The mood circulates. The mood, separated from the work, becomes thin and then generic and then, eventually, embarrassing.

What the lasting change is

A year on, I think brat has produced two genuine shifts in how mid-tier pop gets made and received:

1. The clubgrammar is back. Pre-2010 PC Music-adjacent club production techniques, specifically the over-compressed hyperkinetic synth palette A.G. Cook has been building for a decade, are now the default texture of a large chunk of the pop singles chart. brat normalised that texture at the commercial centre.

2. The low-key-confessional register is more commercially viable. The specific way Charli wrote on brat, mixing club-banger surfaces with plainspoken, relatively unglamorous interior writing, has given permission to a lot of mid-career pop artists to be less performatively aspirational in their writing. That is a real change.

Neither of these is a world-historical shift. Both are the kind of technical redistribution that a major pop record at cultural peak produces.

What’s left to say

A year out, brat is still a record I come back to. “365” is the single I listen to while cooking. “Apple” is the single I listen to when I am driving. The remix of “Girl, so confusing” with Lorde is the single that I keep involuntarily thinking about in relation to every long-term friendship I have ever had that got complicated.

The summer itself is gone. The aesthetic is still with us. The record remains. Put it back on. Start with “Von dutch.” Let the specificity come back.