The brat remix album is here

Charli xcx’s reign is such that the legendary brat summer extended well into the fall. Appropriately for the season, the pop star invited her fans to upstate New York for a listening party at Storm King Art Center. Broad daylight surrounded by fall foliage is not necessarily the place you’d expect to enjoy what can be termed, in Charli parlance, “Club classics.” But it’s a reminder that, spiritually, anything can be brat if you have the right attitude. Including the remix album, which is brat and it’s completely different but also still brat. 

The new album features some of the remixes we’d already heard, like “Guess” featuring Billie Eilish and “Girl, so confusing” featuring Lorde. But there are lots of fresh features, which the singer teased via lime-green backward-text billboards around the country before she officially released the tracklist. The album now features contributions by various artists including Bon Iver, The Japanese House, Julian Casablancas, and The 1975. (Charli is engaged to The 1975’s drummer and producer, George Daniel.) 

The collaborators aren’t the only element that make this version of brat “completely different,” however. Most of the tracks have been substantively changed, with entirely different lyrics even on Charli’s verses. For instance, the original “I think about it all the time” is a meditation on whether she feels ready or even wants to have kids. The remix version with Bon Iver is a post-brat sequel, where she’s under even more pressure and has even less time, increasingly haunted by the question of whether she can balance the demands of having a family with being a famous pop star.

Similarly, the “Sympathy is a knife” remix moves beyond Charli’s personal insecurities about one particular frenemy to broader insecurities stoked by being a woman in the public spotlight. Given the subject matter, it only makes sense that this is the most high-wattage star power track on the new album with a verse from Ariana Grande. “It’s a knife when you know they’re counting on your mistakes/It’s a knife when you’re so pretty, they think you must be fake,” Grande sings on the track, recalling the many times that she’s publicly denied having plastic surgery. In some ways, her verse is a sequel to her own song “we can’t be friends (wait for your love),” where Grande sang about her uneasy relationship with fame and being misunderstood by the media. “It’s a knife when they dissect your body on the front page/It’s a knife when they won’t believe you, why should you explain?” She sings now. Sharing these preoccupations is what makes Grande such a great choice to work with Charli—she may be completely different, but she’s also still brat.