There were lime green tank tops, lime green beanies, lime green hoodies, cowboy hats and sunglasses, and at least one lime green mesh vest, like something a cobblestone might wear. Specially prepared streets. But even those who weren't dressed in the dazzling color of Charli . vibrating with excitement at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles.
“I don't want to sing this one, I just want to hear you sing it,” she said before the beat of “B2B” began at a pulverizing volume, and almost everyone in the room seemed happy to oblige.
With tickets going for hundreds of dollars above their face value on the secondary market, this recent sold-out concert was a call-out from ultra-loyal Charli XCX fans (Charli's Angels, as many call themselves) who have helped maintain its cult favorite status. throughout the decade and changes since she emerged in the early 2010s with appearances on hits like Icona Pop's “I Love It,” which she co-wrote, and her own solo debut, “ “True Romance.” For almost all of Charli's career, her tuneful yet edgy brand of electronic pop has had a distinct appeal to insiders: a kind of “if you know it, you know it” energy that has endeared her to fans more deeply. .
However, signs continue to mount that the world at large is beginning to pay attention.
“Brat,” Charli’s sixth studio LP, debuted last week at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, a personal record for the 31-year-old musician. Reviews for “Brat” have been almost uniformly positive, including praise from the likes of Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and The Guardian.
Lorde, about whom Charli is believed to have written the song “Girl, So Confusing,” offered her take on Instagram, writing that “There's NO ONE like this bitch”; The New Zealander then jumped into a remix of “Girl, So Confusing” that immediately racked up over 5 million streams on Spotify upon its release on Friday. And this fall, Charli will play stadiums on a co-headlining tour with Troye Sivan.
For all her Sanctuary swagger, Charli in “Brat” anticipates the isolating experience of stardom; In the song “Rewind”, she already longs for the days “when she didn't analyze the shape of my face too much” and when she “never thought about Billboard.”
In fact, she's not alone: Charli's sudden rise is just one of several we're seeing this summer, including Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, who are putting up big numbers after years of work in the trenches of pop music.
This week, Carpenter's song “Please, Please,” a yacht-rock jam about a famous woman's anxieties about a public relationship, topped the Hot 100 in just its second week on the chart, followed closely by at number 4 for its neo sparkling wine. -disco smash “Espresso”; A few days earlier, San Francisco's Outside Lands festival announced it had tapped Carpenter, 25, as a last-minute headliner to replace Tyler, the Creator after she dropped out for unspecified reasons.
Meanwhile, Roan just entered the top 10 of the Billboard album chart for the first time with his 2023 breakthrough theatrical LP, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” fueled in large part by the much-discussed appearances of the young man of 26 years. at Coachella and the Governors Ball festival in New York. The other day, Jimmy Fallon asked her on “The Tonight Show” how she felt about finally breaking through, Roan smiled and said, “Looks like I was right all along.”
So why now for these women, and in a year packed with activity, no less, from veteran stars like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Billie Eilish? A leading pop songwriter, granted anonymity so he could speak candidly, notes that part of what's happening is simply a course correction for a music industry that has been hungry for new superstars.
“The last one was Olivia Rodrigo, and that was almost four years ago, that is not normal,” says this person. “There used to be at least one massive leak every year, if not two.”
The COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns deprived record labels of access “to the traditional levers they used to be able to pull” to elevate young artists, the songwriter adds; TikTok filled the void with short-lived hits from “random people in their room, which is lovely, but then you realize they've never hosted a show before and there's nothing to fall in love with.” “It’s just a song and you have no idea who sings it.”
However, something connects Carpenter, Roan and Charli XCX in particular that clearly resonates with listeners. According to Michelle Jubelirer, former CEO of Capitol Music Group who helped orchestrate the rise of Ice Spice, “They are all incredibly strong, independent women who are a little bit sassy and world-building and still authentically themselves.” Jubelirer laughs. “It's like, 'We're done with bulls…,'” she says. “'Accept us for who we are, or fuck off.'”
That nerve is not only manifested in the wink of aggression in a song like Charli's “360,” in which she promises to “shock you like a defibrillator,” or “Please, Please, Please,” in which Carpenter she warns her actor boyfriend not to embarrass her. . It's also in the direct depiction of queer sex in Roan's “Casual” and in the naked vulnerability of Charli's “I Think About It All the Time,” a static ballad about how motherhood fits (or maybe doesn't) into life. of an artist.
“I was walking through Stockholm / Thinking seriously about my future for the first time,” she sings, and then recounts a visit to friends with a new baby. “She's a radiant mother and he's a beautiful father / And now they both know these things that I don't know.”
Robustly but crudely crafted, “I Think About It All the Time” reflects the downright confessional nature of social media, which may be one reason Charli’s music is sparking more passion than the comparatively stripped-down “ Radical Optimism” by Dua Lipa, to name a recent album by a much more famous pop singer who failed to connect with a mass audience this year.
The same goes, perhaps, for the relatively underperforming LPs of Ariana Grande and Kacey Musgraves, both of which featured portraits of women who had searched their souls for their way to a state of emotional balance, unlike people (at the same time). Charli, Sabrina and Chappell). take charge of your unresolved desires and anxieties.
Of course, as happily messy as they may seem, each of these rising pop stars has honed the ability to express that message through years of practice. Roan signed her first major label deal nearly a decade ago and moved to Los Angeles from her native Missouri in 2018; Carpenter, who has an album due in August, made a name for himself on a Disney Channel series and released his first feature film in 2015. As one expert puts it regarding former children's television figures: “Fans grew up with them , So when they break up, they are more than a song because they are already a part of your life. And the Disney girls are well trained: they can deliver when they need to.”
In fact, as Jubilerer points out, Roan and Carpenter have been consistently going viral with performance clips that demonstrate their old-school stage talent — talent that each of them was able to showcase to large audiences on their tours this year, Roan opening for Rodrigo (with whom he shares a producer in Dan Nigro) and Carpenter as one of Swift’s opening acts on her record-breaking Eras tour.
However, the stage is also where a seasoned professional can come face to face with their new, disorienting reality. Performing this month in North Carolina, Roan interrupted his performance in tears to tell his audience that he felt “a little bad” because “my career is going so fast and it's so hard to keep up.” He said he didn't want to put on “a lesser show” because of his feelings and added: “This is all I've ever wanted; it's hard sometimes.”
The crowd quickly roared.
