Charli xcx ran the most successful campaign of 2024 with Brat

Forget any politician—Charli xcx ran the most effective campaign of 2024. Promotion for Brat was not a traditional album campaign, but one about recognition, prestige, and respect. Two years ago, she might have been remembered primarily as the “Boom Clap” girl; she ended this year hosting Saturday Night Live, shutting down Times Square with a pop-up concert, and a Grammy nomination for Album Of The Year. The strategy was meticulously planned, beginning by courting Charli’s most dedicated fans and allowing them to spread the news for her. Her message was an escape from the drudgery of daily life, to disconnect from what was going on outside the club. For most of the year, it seemed that Charli was able to give the people what they wanted, often before they knew they wanted it. On the ground, it was thrilling to watch. 

Politicians have, for decades, behaved like celebrities. And it’s increasingly necessary for celebrities to move like politicians, too. Though the internet democratized access to music and removed geographic barriers to becoming a huge star, the money has dried up. Music is essentially free to consumers online and streaming royalties are a pittance. Artists make their money from touring and merchandizing, leaving them more vulnerable to fans’ whims than in years past, when a well-placed A&R rep could lobby all-powerful record labels for a big marketing push and prominent radio placements. Fans often see supporting their faves as a game of winners and losers, turning fandom into something akin to fantasy football. And the biggest winners—the Taylor Swifts and Beyoncés of the world—command coalitions that rival any president’s. Like politicians, they depend on public approval to maintain power. But here, there are no term limits if you’re inventive enough. 

Heading into Brat, Charli was blunt about her motives: “I was thinking about marketing before I was making the music,” she told Variety. Previously, mainstream recognition had mostly eluded her. Her debut album, 2013’s True Romance, is a glitchy set of tracks born from her time performing at raves as a teen and quickly became a critical favorite. From there, she had a handful of big hits—“I Love It,” “Fancy” with Iggy Azalea, the aforementioned “Boom Clap”—but had hardly been back on the top charts. 2022’s Crash, which she deemed her “major label sell-out record,” was previously her highest-selling album, but hardly made her a household name. If mainstream stardom was her goal, she had unequivocally failed. For her next effort, she needed to recalibrate. 

So, Charli returned to her dedicated base. Through her work with art collective and record label PC Music in the back half of the 2010s, she courted a relatively small, but fervent fanbase, to whom streaming numbers (or the lack thereof) were unimportant. In December 2023, a private Instagram account, @360_brat, appeared. Only a small group of followers was allowed (seemingly mostly through luck) to see clips of what she was working on. There was a sense of freewheeling fun to these posts—social media isn’t real life, usually. She also embraced the term “cult classic.” It positioned her as an underdog (albeit a cool one) and flattered her fans’ sensibilities. If you weren’t with her, it was because you didn’t get it. But the cool kids did. 

The cool kids were out in force at her first major public event of the era. In February 2024, Charli hosted a set for Boiler Room—an incredibly online platform that hosts events for underground-ish dance and electronic musicians—in a warehouse in Brooklyn to preview the Brat era. It was for fans, but it was also the Brat era’s introduction to the media. 25,000 people RSVPed to the free event; only about 400 made it in the door. But if you were a journalist and offered to cover the event for a cool enough publication, you would be guaranteed a spot inside. I, for the record, attended because I won the RSVP lottery. I stood in line for hours with fans, and the door slammed shut behind me—guest 400, apparently. A friend inside tipped me off on where to stand to see Charli’s entrance. She emerged in leather boots, fishnet tights, and an oversized blue T-shirt reading “cult classic.” The room screamed.

The grassroots hype-generation method worked wonderfully. There was plenty for the journalists in attendance to cover. Little of that coverage was the music, which appeared that night in remixed forms compared to Brat proper. But the celebrity guests commanded plenty of attention: Cool girls Addison Rae and Julia Fox performed with Charli, while producers A.G. Cook, The Dare, and Finn Keane (fka EasyFun) stood beside Charli at the mixing table. The “normals” who made it in the door had won a prize and were free to brag about it as such. Those who weren’t inside were left to scour social media for clues about what was to come. 

Charli didn’t make them wait too long. A week later, on Leap Day, she debuted her first message to the public at large: Brat’s lead single “Von Dutch,” which set an early tone. The first words out of her mouth: “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me.” The song is all confident declarations—I’m your number one, I’m just living that life, cult classic but I still pop—the opposite of “relatable” when used to mean charmingly, disarmingly awkward. Brat’s second proper single, “360,” probed similar ground, beginning with the lyric “I went my own way and I made it.” The single line in the past tense, as if to say: If you’re just getting here, that’s what you missed. In the present tense, she’s in a music video with Chloë Sevigny and Rachel Sennott. This is her team—wouldn’t you like to join? 

In June 2024, Charli delivered the album that her campaign had promised. Brat is hedonistic and club-ready with production designed to boom through the biggest speakers available. This is not dance music with an eye toward history, à la Beyoncé’s Renaissance. The moments of reflection (“Rewind,” “Girl, so confusing”) are about the self and her relation to people in her immediate life. The future is even less relevant; the penultimate track “I think about it all the time” questions whether that life is all that it’s cracked up to be, or whether she wants to slow down and have a child. To think about a day beyond tonight. But these anxieties are not dwelt upon; the final track, “365,” argues that there is no tomorrow. Do another bump and the party will last forever. Charli had won her fans’ hearts and bodies with her project—their minds might be an afterthought.

Commercially, Brat was Charli’s biggest yet, though it lagged behind Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish on the Billboard 200. Still—at least in Brooklyn—it felt like she was everywhere. (She’s so Julia.) Her crowds were only getting bigger and more devout. Charli threw an album release concert on June 10 in Brooklyn that attracted even bigger names; Lorde and The 1975’s Matty Healy were there. At the time, it felt like the capstone to a decade-long climb. But Brat Summer, as it came to be known, was around the corner, and it would expand from the internet and the clubs to the real world. 

Brat Summer came right on schedule. Hours after the solstice, on June 21, Charli shared “The Girl, so confusing version with Lorde” after teasing it on Greenpoint’s Brat Wall. As soon as Brat was released, there was wide speculation Lorde was the subject of the original song. (I even said as much in my review.) The excitement for the remix was intense. While the two artists had debuted around the same time and were quick favorites of the Tumblr set, their careers quickly took very different paths. To see them again as contemporaries was significant. Lorde’s 2021 album Solar Power came and went with relatively little fanfare, but it now felt as though she was really returning. That Charli was now the player with the power to invite Lorde to the party was another corner turned, for her and for Brat. The remix established Brat as a living document, written and rewritten so that even one of the more reflective songs on the track list is ever-current. 

But would Brat Summer have taken off had it not served as such vital counterprogramming to the real world? On June 27, Joe Biden and Donald Trump had their first and ultimately only debate of the 2024 election season; immediately after, Biden’s horrible performance would prompt weeks of speculation and punditry that he should step aside and let someone else run in November. On July 13, a bullet grazed Trump’s ear and a bystander was killed at one of his rallies in Pennsylvania in an attempted assassination; Charli xcx apparently met Kyle MacLachlan when this was happening. On July 17, Biden got Covid. The next day, Trump took the stage at the Republican National Convention with a ridiculous ear bandage. On July 21, Biden officially withdrew from the race. At 8:29 pm that night, Charli sent the tweet heard ’round the world: “kamala IS brat.” 

In hindsight, this may be one of the most famous examples of social media being confused with the real world. CNN convened a panel the next day and attempted to define “brat” for the masses, arriving at a girl “who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes.” The Harris campaign embraced this wholeheartedly, recognizing the enthusiasm they so desperately needed. Charli later said that she did support Harris but implied that she didn’t think that hard about the tweet. Regardless, it’s hard to imagine being the subject of cable news segments was bad for her goal of becoming a bigger pop star. On July 25, Pitchfork declared Brat Summer dead, but it was merely another failed assassination attempt. Charli was bigger than ever—and growing. A week later, she remixed “Guess” with Billie Eilish, earning her first top-20 single in a decade. The world was a shambles, and more people were opting to enter Club Brat.

Brat Summer was about to hit the road, too, and the rallies were only getting bigger. Though the Sweat Tour—which Charli co-headlined with Troye Sivan—struggled initially to fill seats outside of the biggest cities, by its kickoff in September, it was a hot ticket. As the tour wore on and the summer wound down, Charli teased a remix album, with billboards spawning all over the country boasting the names of the guest artists included. Having already seen her twice in 2024, I decided not to buy a ticket. When Lorde and Addison Rae appeared on stage with her and Troye at Madison Square Garden, I was filled with so much envy and regret that I rallied three friends for a trip to Miami to catch the show there. Charli had encouraged us via the album to “go Spring Breakers”—I took that literally. 

Spring break forever, Brat Summer forever—whatever month it is, it’s always summer in Miami. When Charli took the stage she shared a “secret”: She was a teensy bit hungover because she had been partying “in your city” the night before. You almost felt bad for Troye, the more polished performer. Charli had the room eating out of the palm of her hand, jumping around the stage, seemingly without much choreography but with rock-star swagger. She dedicated her performance of “Spring Breakers” to the city, and it all felt very charmed. We found out the next day that Harmony Korine was seated a row over from us. The whole weekend rained, but it didn’t matter. Hurricane Milton was about to make landfall, but we hopped on a flight back to New York just before the storm. 

Back in New York, it was definitely autumn, and the album was ready to morph into its next form. Charli debuted her remix album, Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat from the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York. She concluded the Sweat Tour on October 23. Every show had sold out. Meanwhile, a second Trump presidency was knocking, whether we were home to answer the door or not. 

Ultimately, Brat was not a good strategy…for Kamala Harris. But Charli benefitted greatly from aligning herself with a moment of excitement while committing to none of the politics. The pseudo-nihilism of Brat was a baffling thing to center a political campaign on, and was clearly the work of people who only knew it as a meme and a color rather than as a body of work. It was, to borrow from Tim Walz, weird to pin so much goodwill on a phenomenon that was most obviously concerned with courting people who live in Brooklyn. But it was smart, from a marketing standpoint, for Charli to use a political campaign to bolster her musical one. 

Because while a politician needs cold, hard votes, a pop star can skate by on good vibes and a vaguer sense of cultural impact. The numbers that quantify popularity—sales—were never really on Charli’s side. There was an idea that she was battling Luke Combs for the top position on the Billboard 200 when her remix album came out; ultimately, she placed third. But the numbers don’t really matter when evaluating art, as much as fans and pundits might want to gamify pop stardom like they do sports or politics. There are winners and losers in pop culture (especially in American pop culture) but those tabulations are often more ephemeral. They’re determined by SNL hosting gigs and magazine covers and awards and people wearing the shade of green you picked out. 

In December, Charli got one of those magazine covers when she was named Variety’s Hitmaker Of The Year. In her acceptance speech, she dissected the meaning of “hitmaker,” speaking as someone who produced one of the most acclaimed albums of the year but didn’t land a single song in the top 10 of the Hot 100. She compared Brat, in terms of numbers and impact, to The Velvet Underground And Nico, an album that barely charted and sold a meager 30,000 copies in five years. “Even if you have never heard a single song from this album,” she said, “you will undoubtedly recognize its cover, either from the walls of a modern art gallery or from the shop floor of an Urban Outfitters.” You understand why she’s making this comparison. 

And from the beginning, this was her goal more than the album itself. “Music is not important. Artistry is important,” she said on the TikTok series Subway Takes in March, opining she is more interested in the culture and world an artist makes. This kind of campaign is incredibly difficult, exhausting work, but the potential payoff is immense. Brat was reverse-engineered, starting with the images and vibes she wanted to make, arriving at the actual music after. It’s the same strategy as a political campaign seeking to position its candidate in the most flattering light for different groups of constituents. Charli understood that social media isn’t real life, but the Kamala campaign didn’t. The image the Brat campaign created is someone who is too cool to care what tomorrow brings, who seems like she’s having the time of her life despite how stressed and exhausted she actually is. In 2024, that image, that person was irresistible. And she asked us to join her.