35. Bring on the Brat
With the weather slowly warming up in the Southern Hemisphere, it is only fair we get a chance at what the other half of the world just experienced: a Brat Summer. Charli XCX’s hit album Brat took by storm following its release in June. While Americans embraced their Brat Summer, Aussie club-goers donned their jackets while waiting in the Australian winter to defrost and dance to Club Classics the way it was designed to. If you have been living under a rock and aren’t sure what I’m referring to, here’s a crash course on what can qualify as Brat or not. Corded headphones are brat, airpods less so. Ripped tights with a vintage pleated skirt are brat, kitten heels and trousers (although cute) are not technically brat. Wrap around sunglasses are so brat (should be obvious by now), aviators are not. Many things in this life are brat-coded, much of the theme of this album is carefree; the casualality of admitting to being a little bit of a hot mess who drank too much last night and didn’t take their makeup off before bed. Brat is here to be celebrated at house parties and boiler rooms worldwide, hence why we have now been blessed with a second Brat album this Friday, with each song featuring another artist.
Brat has been inescapable since its release and its cultural influence cannot be underestimated. TikTok saw the meteoric rise of singles such as Apple, popularised along with a dance by creator Kelley Heyer. Another trending TikTok, perhaps my favourite, was literally a chopped-up Kamala Harris speech edited to the tune of the album’s opening track 360. AlthoughCharli is not American or affiliated with the Harris campaign, I sing snippets Harris’s “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree” prose when listening to the song. The Brat effect is a true phenomenon.
And yes, I am mentioning the Grammy’s for the millionth time on this blog. Still, the next Grammy Awards has some serious female contenders in Charli’s Brat, The Tortured Poets Department (Swift), eternal sunshine (Grande), Hit Me Hard And Soft (Eilish), Cowboy Carter (Beyoncé) and Radical Optimism (Lipa) for Album of the Year, just to name a few!!!
As I sit here and write this, Charli XCX has just been announced as the headline act at Laneway Festival which will take place in cities across Australia, hitting Melbourne on February 14th 2025. Consider my 2025 Valentine’s Day plans sorted. Nothing’s changed but I’m so excited by the music scene right now and coming into our well-deserved Australian Brat Summer, you should be too!! While Charli and Troye Sivan take the touring world by storm on their conjoined Sweat tour right now, we shall all wait patiently with our chipped nail polish and spray-painted tank tops (iykyk).
