Disc review | Charli XCX’s album is like a self-esteem pill, which when listening to Helsinginkatu feels like a catwalk

Pop / Album

Charli XCX: Brat. Atlantic.

★★★★

British superstar Charli XCX seems to be taking the listener to the club with her new album, but also to love, heartaches, self-esteem problems. You can dance for joy and sorrow.

And what would boost the ego better than dancing to your own songs. Made with appropriate lightness I Wanna Dance to Me tells exactly this.

The whole album is like a self-esteem pill that makes your insecurities disappear. Charli XCX brings her own stardom to relate to, and even while listening, the flash lights flash, and Helsinginkatu starts to feel like a catwalk.

Hyperrealistic in addition to the lyrics, hyperactivity is added by a hyperpop star AG Cook, who is responsible for the album’s production. The high-speed synths and intoxicating tempo will certainly work for the generations of the Tiktok era. The drummer of the band The 1975 and the artist’s spouse are also involved in the production George Daniel and another standard producer Finn Keane.

Club rhythms have been broken just right with the suvannas. Everything Is Romantic is a beautiful and ultimately chaotic depiction of the fickleness of love, and So I is a vulnerable farewell song for the artist’s long-term collaborator and friend For Sophie.

Dedicated to all bad girls, Mean Girls is again like Charli XCX’s version Curry Dog For my many from the song.

Single songs too were successful. Von Dutch is the club’s saber-piercing banger, and B2B is an ingenious play on words between the back to back of dj culture, i.e. alternating playing of records, and falling in love again and again. Fortunately, the song stays far from B2B company sales, even if a certain commercialism marks the album.

I Think About It All the Time even brought a tear to my eye. A new angle about femininity on the record is motherhood. Charli deals with her own birth control in such a personal way that the song can almost be considered an invitation to a baby shower.

365 ultimately leaves the listener in the middle of chaos and feels like some kind of overdose in the form of sound. The ingenious shaping of the album’s first song ends the clubbing of the album into a dark hangover.