Charli XCX is too real (2024)

You can practically smell the scent of sweat, poppers, and peach ice vape smoke through the screen. A packed New York warehouse party: Charli XCX struts out of her dressing room with the charisma of a cult leader. Rocking sunglasses, her wavy black hair matching the puffer jacket draped off her shoulders, she radiates an unbothered cool, a messy recklessness. XCX pouts at the camera, finally removing her shades to reveal Cleopatra eyeliner and a T-shirt that reads CULT CLASSIC. The crowd rages, the beats drop, and a glowing forcefield of iPhones remain hoisted aloft, documenting every second.

Within a few hours of sign-ups going live in mid February, XCX’s Boiler Room performance shattered the company’s RSVP records. Over 35,000 acolytes vied for just 400 spots at the Bushwick rave, given away via a lottery. Later that night, XCX was joined on stage by her frequent collaborators and avant-pop producers AG Cook and Easyfun, as well as her fiancé George Daniel, the drummer and producer for The 1975. Her friend Julia Fox and TikTok phenom turned multi-hyphenate Addison Rae turned up too. Apart from Beyoncé and Taylor Swift’s tours (the latter of whom tapped XCX to open for her in 2018), it’s difficult to conceive of a recent event from a solo artist that has generated anything near this level of online buzz.

“It was crazy. It felt like I could really connect with my fans and break through the noise,” XCX says. Two months later, she is lounging poolside at 9.30am on a Friday in Palm Springs, the Southern California desert town so eternally sunny that it can feel almost sinister. These are not the hours you typically associate with the 31-year-old, whose deconstructed club pop is intrinsically built for the type of illegal late-night raves that Boiler Room aspires to recreate.

Those lucky enough to win the ticket lottery described the event with the rapture usually reserved for dance music lore: the libidinous disco funk spun at Manhattan’s Paradise Garage, or the acid-house bacchanalia at Manchester’s Haçienda. When the performance was finally released on YouTube a month later, it was instantly canonised by millions of Charli’s “Angels”:

@joshhart775
Born to be a rave dj, forced to be a pop diva
9K

@talkstobees
Born too late to buy a house in my 20s but just in time to dance to this legendary set in my room
2.4K

@ajw2571
my kids will have generational trauma from my not being there
7.1K

Boiler Room’s own caption called the show “a cultural reset”, which underscores the impact of an event that symbolically shook off the last lingering after-effects of what the pandemic wrought on nightlife. In a culture of corporate “experiences”, XCX created what has become an increasingly rare phenomenon: an organic moment, one that artfully straddled both the digital and physical worlds. “It feels like underground scenes are back and people just want to be in physical spaces and be a part of something,” she says.

As organic as it seemed, the Boiler Room set was in fact the opening act in the several-months-long masterclass in viral marketing that is the rollout of XCX’s new album, Brat. “I think this campaign is so good because we’re so f*cking bullish and laser-focused on every single f*cking thing,” XCX says. “I’ve had hour-long discussions about the positioning of font or like what I’m gonna post on f*cking Instagram… There’s no weak sh*t going on in the way that there are with some other pop campaigns right now.”

Brat highlights the unique position in music XCX inhabits, after a dozen or so years of nonlinear ascent. In the UK, XCX is worshipped by pop fans, LGBTQIA+ audiences and music critics alike, who revere her songcraft and self-aware ability to puncture genre and expectations. But in America, she can still seemingly go mostly unrecognised at a hotel pool. (As she says in another lyric on Brat, she’s “famous, but not quite”.) She’s an artist who abhors algorithm-friendly assembly-line songwriting, yet whose last album, 2022’s Crash, topped the UK charts. As Pitchfork described her in its rave review of “Von Dutch”, the lead single from Brat, she’s a “Y2K-obsessed millennial, fashion icon, and notoriously under-appreciated pop talent using wicked meta-commentary to dare you to call her a flop.” Or, as XCX herself puts it on “Von Dutch”: “cult classic, but I still pop.”

This happens to be the first weekend of Coachella, which is why XCX is in Palm Springs. Last night, the hard seltzer brand White Claw hired her to play its pre-festival “Shore Club” party. Compared with most acts on the Coachella line-up, XCX’s stature is massive: she boasts nearly 13 million monthly listeners on Spotify and 4.6 million Instagram followers. But in the wider pop landscape, those numbers are significantly fewer than artists like Dua Lipa (78 million monthly Spotify listeners) or Taylor Swift (115 million). That puts XCX in an interesting artistic position: is it better to aspire to the level of world-conquering pop behemoth, or stay an emissary of the underground?

“I’m constantly going back and forth in my conflict around fame and what constitutes success,” XCX says. “This new music is not going to be played in Starbucks. It’s not going to be played on the Zen Morning playlist. It’s pop music and I’m being true to myself. But I also know that if I chose a slightly different, maybe more palatable path, I do have the skills as a songwriter to write big Top 40 pop hits.”

At the Shore Club party last night, she wore bejewelled boy shorts and writhed for the cameras – channelling the more premeditated pop stars of the past. On this searingly bright morning, though, XCX dresses simply: jean shorts and a black vest top, paired with black sunglasses that never come off. When talking about Brat, she explains how, while recording, the album’s title became self-fulfilling: “I definitely become more of a ‘bitch’… I have more diva tantrums.” But the liberties that you might take as a bestselling solo artist who’s also written and appeared on platinum singles for others – including Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” – are absent at the moment. She is without make-up or entourage; the only real clues that she might be a pop icon are the calf-length black leather boots that she wears to lounge by the pool.

On Brat, XCX is expressing the mid-noughties, a period in which pop culture was dominated by trashiness and lurid glamour. The songs themselves exist within the carefully delineated parameters of XCX’s high-low art pop; they’re stripped down but fluorescently bright, filled with sticky pop hooks, seemingly built to soundtrack an MDMA-and-nitrate-addled after-party. In many ways the album embodies XCX’s ideal final form: a reimagination of Britney Spears’ Blackout as theoretically produced by the Ed Banger crew, the Parisian collective who defined the blog-haus sound of that era.

“We’re in this place where people thought pop music needed to be big and full of poetic metaphors to give it some kind of authenticity, which I don’t think is true at all,” XCX says. “I wanted to create this world of that 2000s flip phone, cameras flashing, live fast, die young. I wanted my lyrics to be conversational because that’s what I think pop culture actually is: it’s a 15-second TikTok, a selfie in a cloud, a text to your friends being like ‘Where you at, bitch?’”

The demands of modern pop require constant growth and acceleration. (It’s fitting that the song that XCX contributed to the soundtrack of last year’s billion-dollar Barbie movie was called “Speed Drive”.) But making the forward-thinking club music that XCX wants to make, while still receiving the full backing of the machine, requires a constant push-and-pull with often clueless executives. This dissonance can manifest itself in bizarre ways. For instance, Charli tells me that in January her team received a list of absurd-but-serious marketing gambits from a company hired by her label, Atlantic Records. Suggestions included: crashing drag brunches and lip-syncing to her own songs; getting her nipples pierced at Claire’s; announcing that she was running for President; leaking a sex tape in the night-vision style of 1 Night in Paris; faking a mental breakdown on the Tube in a full ballgown; and having a “Winona Moment” (getting caught shoplifting).

“They were really obsessed with me having viral posts,” XCX says. “I was like, ‘OK, everyone’s going to try their best!’ But I don’t think we can live and die on this hill of ‘We must have a viral post.’ So when they sent me these insane ideas, I was like, ‘Obviously, we just have to post this document.’”

Of course, if you were trying to come up with the perfect stunt for marketing Charli XCX as the quintessential rebellious anti-pop pop star, this is exactly what you would do. But XCX swears that the list was real – and Atlantic got its viral moment after she enlisted her friends to read the schemes out loud, dramatically mocking it for the TikTok and Insta masses.

What might otherwise be considered publicity stunts are, for XCX, actually ways of articulating her own idiosyncrasy. Take a recent, widely shared appearance on the popular clip show Subway Takes. When asked what her hot take was, XCX replied, “Music is not important.” After the host laughed at the slightly tongue-in-cheek opinion, she explained the ethos: “I need an artist to create the world. A great artist to me is more than the songs, it’s the entire culture and space that they inhabit.”

Here, sitting up on a white chaise longue in the shade of a large palm tree, the tension between success and authenticity – being an artist who creates culture, rather than just reflecting it – is clearly on her mind. “I know that if I suffered in silence, pushed through it and didn’t say what was on my mind, and maybe got like a brow lift or whatever, I could probably operate in a more commercial world,” XCX says. “Sometimes I tempt myself with going there, but I think the problem is my fanbase knows that that’s not who I am, so they kind of smell a rat, and they’re like, ‘This is inauthentic.’ But then I think that sometimes puts me in this position where the masses are like, ‘What the f*ck is this?’”

Still, it’s tempting; XCX knows that she could, if she wanted, pursue that kind of mainstream success. “But I would in no way be as happy, creatively satisfied or, honestly, as good as some of the people who are operating on a hugely commercial level,” she says, “because maybe I’m just not built for it.”

Even before any songs existed, the tension always lurked. It was the late noughties, a weird era of sordid headlines and tabloid scandal; the precipice before the global financial crisis, when everything seemed to be on the edge of combustion. The gossip magazines and paparazzi relentlessly chronicled the rise and fall of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Amy Winehouse.

As a teenager, XCX – then still Charlotte Aitchison – lived a relatively sheltered existence, attempting to understand the outside world from her bedroom in the middle-class Essex countryside. The only child of a former nurse of Gujarati Indian descent and a Scottish father who had been adopted, XCX always considered herself an outsider. “I always felt like a loser,” she says. “I had friends, but my school was full of blonde white girls and I was this half-Indian girl with frizzy hair and different interests. That always made me feel a little bit rejected. I thought if I made music, people would think I was interesting… Deep down, one of my biggest fears was being boring.”

At the time, the first massively popular social network, MySpace, had just opened up a cultural ecosystem for music fans like XCX – one that exposed her to artists beyond her formative inspirations of Spears, the Spice Girls and Siouxsie Sioux. She became enamoured with Paris’ Ed Banger collective – including Justice, Uffie and DJ Mehdi – which was then lighting up the blogs. In an attempt to make herself feel a little cooler, she started making her own amateur rave music with a Yamaha keyboard and an eight-track digital recorder.

Taking her performance alias from her MSN Messenger screen name, XCX created a MySpace page to post her demos. Soon, the 14-year old received an invitation to perform at an illegal rave in East London. “My mum, in particular, was terrified. She grew up in Uganda and never really drank, never smoked a cigarette. She came from a Muslim family where the idea of a 14-year-old going to a rave was completely alien,” she recalls.

The teenaged XCX’s notion of clubbing consisted almost entirely of photos posted by the American nightlife photographer Mark Hunter, aka The Cobrasnake, and the scene in Skins where Effy gets thrown out of a rave. In another life, her entrepreneur father had been a small-time concert promoter – but even he wasn’t prepared for his secondary school–aged daughter performing at 3am in front of ravers throwing up after taking too much ketamine. The entire family showed up so early for her first show that the organisers were still setting up.

“As I did more of them, [my parents] got it,” XCX laughs. “After I got signed, I actually struggled performing for a while because it was different. The crowds were more music lovers, rather than people who wanted to take drugs, party and listen to DJs. I’ve always been trying to get back to that party energy, and I think from [2016’s] Vroom Vroom onwards, I have.”

By her late teens, XCX had signed a major label deal with Atlantic Records. After a few semesters studying at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art, she dropped out to spend time working with producers in Los Angeles. Several of her early singles garnered plaudits from Pitchfork and other online tastemakers, but mass appeal remained elusive. Her breakthrough arrived with “I Love It” – which XCX wrote and co-performed with the Swedish synth-pop duo Icona Pop – a global smash so seared into the collective memory that as soon as you hear the scream-shouted hook (“I DON’T CARE!”) you’re instantly transported back to wherever you were in 2012.

But XCX’s debut album, 2013’s True Romance, couldn’t translate her critical praise into crossover success. XCX could’ve been dropped by her label and been consigned to write hits for more marketable names, but the following year, Azalea’s “Fancy” became one of the biggest rap songs in the world. XCX not only wrote its hook, but chanted its refrain with a bratty affectation. She appeared in the Clueless-themed video as Brittany Murphy’s character Tai, the insecure misfit who eventually becomes a popular obsession.

Between her own solo albums, XCX became one of the industry’s most in-demand young pop songwriters, penning tracks for everyone from Camila Cabello and Selena Gomez to Blondie. After one of these songs, “Boom Clap”, was passed on by Hilary Duff’s management team, XCX kept it for herself, and it eventually made it to the soundtrack of the 2014 blockbuster The Fault in Our Stars. It became her first Top 10 hit as a solo artist and went triple platinum in the US.

For a while, her life threatened to become a cliché of pop-star excess. “I was travelling constantly for two years. My dad got cancer and recovered from it [in that time] and I didn’t see him because I was just travelling,” XCX says. “My life was crazy. But when you’re 21, you can go full throttle: f*cking party, drink, be an idiot, and still feel fine. You can go to shoots kind of drunk, but not really show it. You can do it all.”

With Lady Gaga abandoning her post as pop’s pre-eminent left-of-centre star to croon jazz duets with Tony Bennett, the stage was set for XCX to fill the void. But her punk-slanted sophom*ore album, 2014’s Sucker, couldn’t capitalise on the momentum. Shortly thereafter, she embarked on a series of artistically risky but vital collaborations that could have destroyed her career, but instead cemented her as one of the chief innovators of 21st-century pop music.

The metamorphosis started with 2016’s Vroom Vroom, an EP produced primarily by the late Scottish DJ and producer Sophie, a pop futurist closely affiliated with AG Cook’s PC Music collective. But rather than being embraced for its experimentation, the record was often maligned for its perceived vapidity and chaotic sensibilities. “My record label was like, ‘What the f*ck is this?’” says XCX. “Across the board, no one got it, apart from a small handful of pretty hardcore fans.”

In the years since, Vroom Vroom and its 2017 spiritual successors, Number 1 Angel and Pop 2, have received retroactive credit for inspiring the genre now codified as hyper pop. But it went deeper than mere influence: XCX’s collaborations with Sophie and Cook fundamentally shifted her own instincts, helping her to become more fearless. “Sophie was making the music that I had been trying to make for a long time, but didn’t have the skills to,” XCX says, her voice lowering to a whispered octave.

Sophie, who became a close friend, died in a fall from an Athens rooftop in 2021. XCX briefly wipes away tears when talking about her, and pauses to collect her thoughts. “Working with Sophie bred this hyper-creativity,” she continues. “She was never afraid to say ‘no’ and to be really honest, sometimes in a kind of brutal way. She lit a fire in me for being able to be confrontational and stand my ground in creative decisions and scenarios. She helped me feel comfortable to be myself.”

XCX’s last album, 2022’s Crash, was dedicated to Sophie. A metafictional concept album about a defiant pop star finally selling out to the machine, it ironically allowed XCX to achieve some long-held goals: topping the album charts in the UK, Ireland and Australia – and earning her first Top 10 spot in the United States. Varied brand deals with the likes of JW Anderson, Pandora Jewelry and Doritos came too. She even used an A&R representative for the first time, which meant a far more collaborative process with the label. “I wanted to play a character,” XCX says. “I was dressing in a vampy, highly sexualised way. I was doing choreography on stage for the first and probably last time. It was cool and I’m happy that I did it. I achieved what I wanted, but I definitely can only listen to four or five of those songs now.”

The increased popularity seems to have afforded her a certain level of creative freedom. Fights with benighted label brass will probably always be unavoidable, but Brat feels like XCX’s most fully realised exercise in world-building. Her lyrics can be confrontational, but also capable of sincerity and pathos. “So I” explores the complexity of the recurring waves of grief surrounding Sophie’s death. “I Think About It All the Time” is a strikingly candid confessional of a workaholic entering their 30s, thinking about their future and potentially having a child, and how small their career feels in the grand scheme of existence.

“This isn’t an album that could’ve been made by 2016 Charli,” says Cook, who worked closely with XCX throughout the making of Brat. “She sounds so natural now and completely in control, even over the craziest instrumentals. She’s not one of those voices that gets lost – and all these really wild parts are in support of her and her lyrics. The balance feels really satisfying.”

There’s the sense that, after a dozen years of navigating the high-pressure churn of the pop industrial vortex, this is finally XCX’s moment – at least if you’re immersed in the online attention economy that can’t stop talking about her every move, whether it’s releasing a viral clip of Addison Rae adding screaming ad-libs to “Von Dutch”, enlisting dubstep legends Skream and Benga to produce remixes, or taking out ads on gay dating app Grindr to promote her upcoming tour with Troye Sivan.

Even in her personal life, the tales of late-night debauchery that would often populate past interviews appear to have largely subsided. XCX still parties, but says that she’s more apt to selectively pick her spots than embark on bouts of spontaneous revelry. After the end of an on-again, off-again relationship that lasted a number of years, she’s happy with George Daniel, who co-produced several songs on the new record.

“Meeting George changed everything for me,” XCX says. “I’ve always had the power in my relationships, which was great to a point, but I’ve always needed to spar with someone. And I’ve never been with someone as super creative as George obviously is. We have such a mutual respect of each other’s work, and challenge each other. I feel a lot more grounded and calm being with him. Honestly, not to sound super sappy, but he inspires me daily.”

The waiter, who seems oblivious to her notoriety, asks if XCX wants anything else. She politely declines. By now, it’s getting close to noon. The area by the pool has begun to fill up with hotel guests trying to get in a last-minute swim and pre-festival tan. About a dozen feet away, two 20-something girls with Y2K style nervously banter about whether or not to try to talk to XCX. Finally, during a pause in the conversation, they approach. One is blonde, one is brunette; they’re both wearing Coachella wristbands.

“Hi, I’m so sorry to interrupt,” the brunette says with an awkward sweetness. “I’m just such a big fan of yours. I just wanted to say hi. I fought for my life to get your Boiler Room tickets!”

“Did you get them?” XCX says.

“No, but I just want to say how impactful your music is, and how impactful it is for me and my queer friends,” says the girl, flashing an awed smile.

“And your TikToks slay,” the blonde friend adds.

“Thank you,” XCX says, smiling at them appreciatively. “I’m doing an interview right now, so you just made me look really cool.” The three of them make conversation about the Coachella line-up for another minute or two, then the girls politely excuse themselves, but not before thanking her three times, as if she has just granted them a wish for eternal life.

As soon as they leave, and with perfect comic timing, XCX deadpans: “I swear I didn’t pay them to say that.”

See Charli XCX at GQ Heroes in Oxfordshire, from 3-5 July, in association with BMW UK. For more information and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com.

Styling by Brandon Tan
Hair by Matt Benns
Make-up by Jezz Hill
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub
Set Design by Mike Feswick
Production by Farago Projects