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The 50 best albums of 2024: No 1 – Charli xcx: Brat (and Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat)
Smart, funny, moving and full of big tunes, the in-your-face masterpiece was the right album at the right time, striking a cultural nerve and defining a change in mindset
She gamely presented Crash as another experiment in “making a major-label album the way it’s actually done” and knowingly embracing “everything that the life of a pop figurehead has to offer in today’s world – celebrity, obsession and global hits”, but you somehow sensed her heart wasn’t quite in it. It felt fundamentally honest: instead of pop’s usual broad-brushstroke self-help platitudes, there was something striking about the splurge of complex, vacillating feelings regarding motherhood on I Think About It All the Time, or the mixture of admiration and resentment on Mean Girls. Taylor Swift, meanwhile, was apparently so rattled by Brat’s arrival that she suddenly released six different deluxe editions of her album The Tortured Poets Department in order to keep it from reaching No 1 in the UK.
Or read this on The Guardian
