It was Lorde's idea to work it out with Charli xcx on the remix

No matter what happens for the rest of the year, this writer can claim with absolute certainty that Charli xcx’s “The girl, so confusing remix with lorde” will be one of the best music moments of 2024. Lorde’s instantly iconic verse on the (already very good) brat track—the one that was originally written about her—completely changed the meaning of the song from a one-sided musing on a confusing connection to a breakthrough moment where two old friends were truly able to “work it out on the remix.”

As Charli predicted, the internet did, in fact, go crazy when she posted a screenshot of a text from Lorde containing the incredibly raw lyrics to her verse. The pair garnered praise from all corners of the internet for the song’s authenticity and especially for the blunt but cutting words Lorde apparently wrote the morning she woke up to a voice note about the original track from Charli. Thankfully, as seems to be the case with much of the album’s excellent rollout, the genesis of the track is as organic as it claims.

In a new interview with Billboard, Charli confirmed that the remix was actually Lorde’s idea. “I had to go through the process of telling her that this song is about her and her being OK with that first,” Charli said of the original track, which expounds on the fact that people say the two artists are alike (“they say we’ve got the same hair”), but their connection sometimes “feels a bit awkward/‘Cause we don’t have much in common.”

“I was trying to meet up with her for almost a year, and we kept having this weird, like, we were [going to], then we wouldn’t. It spoke to the narrative of the song itself. In the end, it didn’t work out,” Charli continued. “Then the day before the record came out, I left her a voice note. [Lorde] replied straight away and was like, ‘Oh, my God, I had no idea you felt this way. I’m so sorry.’ And then was like, ‘You know, maybe I should be on a version of the song.’ I didn’t even ask her. She brought it up.” In total, it took three days to make the remix.

Billboard also spoke to Lorde, who said her first reaction to the song was a “two-part thing of both deep empathy for my friend and this feeling of ‘Man, I’ve been misunderstood, and I really want to make it right.’” That’s not only an incredibly mature response to a song containing the lyrics “I don’t know if you like me/Sometimes I think you might hate me/Sometimes I think I might hate you,” but also a unique impetus for unprecedented communication in a situation most of us have been in at some point in our lives.

“When I was writing this verse, I was saying these things to her for the first time,” Lorde said. “There was such a rawness and an immediacy to what I was saying. I love that we truly did work it out on the remix. There’s something very brat about that, something very meta and modern. Only Charli could make that happen. She had opened up a channel between us, and it made me say things that I had never said. I was articulating things I’d never said or maybe even things I’ve never even heard said. This whole thing has been such a huge honor.” Maybe it doesn’t need to be so confusing to be a girl after all.