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Music / Charli XCX

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It's Charli, baby.

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Charlotte Emma Aitchison (born August 2, 1992), better known by her stage name Charli XCX, is a British singer-songwriter of Scottish and Gujarati Indian descent.

She first reached mainstream prominence with her single "Boom Clap" (from the soundtrack of The Fault in Our Stars), as well as some collaborations with Icona Pop ("I Love It") and Iggy Azalea ("Fancy"), the latter of which went to #1 in the United States for a span of weeks in summer 2014. Prior to her breakthrough, she recorded two albums — 2008's 14, which was never officially released, and 2013's True Romance, her official debut record.

Following the success of "Fancy," her sophomore effort Sucker was released in 2014, featuring a departure from the electronic pop she became known for to '90s-inspired riot grrrl. Reception of the album was mixed. Perhaps in response to this lukewarm reaction, she eventually returned to her roots with the Vroom Vroom EP in 2016.

Produced entirely by electronic musician SOPHIE, Vroom Vroom is notable for its industrial-tinged sound. Charli followed this up with two collaboration-heavynote  mixtapes across 2017, Number 1 Angel and Pop 2, which were produced by various acts associated with the PC Music label, particularly its founder A.G. Cook (beginning a professional creative relationship which persists to this day), along with a smattering of independent singles.

After several years of stalling and development hiccups, her third proper studio album, Charli, was announced and released in late 2019. Her following album, how i'm feeling now, was conversely produced in a relatively short turnaround from quarantine during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and released in early 2020.

Her fifth album, CRASH, was released in 2022, marking her final album with Atlantic Records as part of her initial record deal. Unlike Charli's post-Vroom Vroom repertoire, CRASH returns to a more conventional approach to dance music and synthpop, described by Charli as being "for the True Romance angels."

In addition to releasing her own music, she's also a successful songwriter for other artists, having written the hit singles "Same Old Love" for Selena Gomez, "Beg for It" for Iggy Azalea, and "Senorita" for Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello, while having also written tracks for the likes of James Blunt, will.i.am, Rita Ora, TXT, TWICE and Blondie.

Discography:

  • True Romance (2013)
  • Sucker (2014)
  • Vroom Vroom EP (2016)
  • Number 1 Angel (2017)
  • Pop 2 (2017)
  • Charli (2019)
  • how i'm feeling now (2020)
  • CRASH (2022)
  • Bottoms (2023)* - Original Score
  • BRAT (2024)

Hit Singles:

"I was busy thinkin' bout tropes..."

  • The '90s: "1999," a collaboration with Troye Sivan, is a huge nostalgic love letter to the decade, with lyrics referencing Britney Spears, All That, and Eminem, with the music video directly recreating some of its imagery.
  • all lowercase letters: All titles of how i'm feeling now are rendered like this.
  • Alone in a Crowd: As elaborated by Charli, "Gone" is about the anxieties and insecurities of being in a large social crowd, feeling isolated and wanting to be gone from it all.
    I feel so unstable, fucking hate these people
    How they making me feel lately, they making me weird, baby, lately
    I feel so unstable, fucking hate these people
    How they making me loathe, they making me loathe
  • Animeland: The video for "SuperLove," in which she and some friends go to some kind of techno dance club in Tokyo with robots and yakuza bikers.
  • Auto-Tune: Charli freely admits to using it regularly as a crutch for her voice, even during live performances. That said, her application of it tends to be pretty creative, able to extend her range to deliberately synthetic extents on tracks like "Lucky" or "Click."
  • Award-Bait Song: "Official" is a song which by Charli's own admission was created with the expressed purpose of being a "perfect" pop song. To boot, it's a soft ballad and one of her most straightforward love songs.
  • Broken Record: Quite a few of Charli’s songs contain this, usually in their choruses.
    • Even in one of her earliest hits “I Love It” with Icona Pop whose chorus is Charli screaming “I don’t care, I love it!”
    • The chorus of "I Got It," which lyrically consists of Charli rhythmically saying "I got it I got it I got it I got it I got it I got it..."
    • A similar thing happens with "Shake It," whose hook is Charli speaking "I shake it I shake it I shake it ooh, I shake it I shake it all on you."
    • "Unlock It"’s repeated refrains of “Lock it lock it lock it lock it lock it lock it, unlock it.”
    • The “Focus” chorus which is simply made up of “I just want you to focus on my love, just focus on my…” you get the idea.
    • “Do you wanna roll with me? Do you wanna roll with me? Say yeah” And “yeah yeah yeah” from “Roll With Me.”
    • Used very effectively in “pink diamond,” a song about going stir-crazy in isolation.
      I just wanna go real hard, I just wanna go real hard, pink diamond in the dark...
    • The “party 4 u” chorus repeats “I only threw this party for you.”
  • The Cameo:
    • She featured in Danny Brown's song "Float On," but her only role was to provide backing vocals in the chorus.
    • The video for "Break The Rules" features a brief appearance by Rose McGowan as a Sadist Teacher who pours pink goo over Charli and her friends at prom a-la Carrie.
    • The video for "Vroom Vroom" features brief appearances by A.G. Cook (founder of PC Music and later a major producer for most of Charli's work beginning with Number 1 Angel) and Hannah Diamond (a prominent PC Music act and friend to both Charli and Cook).
      • Cook also appears in the video for "Every Rule," accompanying Charli on keyboard.
    • The video for "Boys" contains a ton, listed below in Massive Multiplayer Crossover.
  • Camera Abuse: The music video for "Von Dutch" takes this up to 11. The camera (the POV of an obsessive paparazzi chasing her through an airport) takes a vicious beating from Charli—it gets punched, kicked, hit with a suitcase, and even pushed down the stairs.
  • Car Song: "Vroom Vroom" is about living the high life through fast cars, and "Porsche" is Charli's rumination on treating herself to the titular luxury car following a bitter breakup. To a lesser degree, she also frequently references cars as a metaphor for other subjects, such as in "Backseat," "White Mercedes," and "Crash."
  • Careful with That Axe: Post "CRASH" Tour, Charli has consistently begun performances of "Vroom Vroom" with a guttural scream as the beat drops.
  • Child Popstar: She started recording music in her early teens and made her first album when she was 14, which was funded by her own father.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: Charli XCX curses fairly often in her songs, but "Sucker" takes it to a whole new level. However, her most famous song "Boom Clap," and the entire How I'm Feeling Now album are notably devoid of swearing.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: She has synesthesia (to be more specific, a kind called chromesthesia) which means she sees music as colours. Since she prefers music that's black, purple, pink, and red, she had no problem with letting Icona Pop record "I Love It" instead of her, as it wasn't in a colour she liked.
    "I’ve wanted to write good pop music, beautiful pop music—not just throwaways. I’ve always wanted to make it sound luscious, and beautiful and cinematic. I feel like I’ve done that with this record. The way that I describe it is purple pop music, it’s moody, emotional and rich."
  • Cool People Rebel Against Authority: Pretty much the basis behind "Break the Rules."
  • Costume Porn: The video for "Used To Know Me" shows Charli in variety of different outfits, most of which are played for Fanservice. Includes an 80s-inspired leotard, a cheerleader, a latex catsuit, and a sexy nun.
  • Death by Music Video:
    • She attends her own funeral in the "Good Ones" video, and she collapses at the end.
    • Implied at the end of "Von Dutch" in which she and the paparazzi are both riding on the baggage carousel, motionless and badly injured.
  • Epic Rocking: "Track 10" from Pop 2 is her first and currently only song from her albums to go past the five minute mark.
  • Fading into the Next Song: Nearly every song on True Romance and the entirety of the Heartbreaks & Earthquakes EP.
  • Fangirl: Of Britney Spears. She made special mention of her love of Blackout.
  • Female Gaze: The ''Boys'' video has many handsome celebrities posing in scenarios that are usually considered for women.
  • Former Teen Rebel: Her high school years included performing at underground rave parties (which her parents even came to) and "rummaging through CD crates for punk CDs and wearing defiant outfits to school — 'five belts instead of one,' she recalls — in order to demonstrate her overall rebelliousness."
  • Genre Mashup: Her music is a mix of synthpop, dark wave, pop punk, electronica, witch house, and whatever else she feels like. Taken to an extreme with the Vroom Vroom EP, which can be best described as "experimental pop" — trap, grime, EDM, bubblegum pop, and industrial hip-hop (complete with her rapping for the first time) come together here to create something completely different.
  • Genre Throwback: In stark contrast to her now-signature hyperpop sound of the future, CRASH consists of tracks greatly inspired by more traditional genre sounds from the '80s and '90s, with Charli citing Janet Jackson as one particular major influence. The Title Track is effectively Charli's take on New Jack Swing, "New Shapes" a mixture of '80s Synth-Pop and Indie Pop, "Yuck" an invocation of classic funk and disco, etc.
  • Girl's Night Out Episode: "Girls Night Out," to nobody's surprise, complete with the repeating chorus of "No boys, no boys!"
  • Gratuitous Foreign Language:
    • "I Got It" and "Shake It" feature entire guest verses by the Brazilian Pabllo Vittar in Portuguese.
    • "February 2017" is closed with a verse from Yaeji in Korean.
  • Grief Song: A song she sang at Billboard's Women In Music awards, "So I," is about her late producer and friend SOPHIE, and how she wishes she could have spent more time with her before she passed away.
    And I know you always said it's okay to cry
    So I know I can cry, I can cry, so I cry
  • Hard-Drinking Party Girl: She frequently indulges in this imagery, from "Fancy" to "Break the Rules" to "After the Afterparty."
  • Hell-Bent for Leather: She often wears leather jackets, paired with Cool Shades. One of the single cover arts for "1999"◊ features her and Troye Sivan in full Matrix-style getup.
  • Hidden Depths: You probably wouldn't pick up on it on first listen, but her musical influences are quite eclectic—including mainstream pop acts like Britney Spears, The Black Eyed Peas, and Janet Jackson, but also more alternative/avant-garde acts such as Kate Bush, Crystal Castles, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Lou Reed.
  • Identical Stranger: Some believe she looks like Lily Collins, or Sasha Grey. Also bears some resemblance to Lorde.
  • Intercourse with You:
    • The chorus of "What I Like."
    • Also in "Champagne Coast," she says "come into my bedroom" thirty-two times. Not exactly subtle.
    • "Lipgloss" featuring CupcakKe is all about girls getting oral sex.
  • Last Note Nightmare:
    • "claws" ends with an increasingly loud, synth-y buildup that in context sounds like it's leading to a climactic final verse, but abruptly it dissolves into glitched-out chaos for a few seconds. And then the song ends.
    • The ending to "visions," the final track of how i'm feeling now, is an emotional yet energetic ballad wrapped in a hardstyle beat for the most part, but in the final minute once Charli's vocals fade out, the instrumental begins to break down, becoming increasingly stressful and cacophanic mess of distorted synths before suddenly fading out. It's arguably framed like a Sudden Downer Ending, as the song itself is a celebration of a future with her lover that had yet to occur, making the ending sound like as if even the song has no idea of what comes next.
  • Lighter and Softer: After the Dark Wave-influenced True Romance, she made a Genre Shift to pop-punk and electroclash on Sucker.
  • Lockdown: how i'm feeling now was created during and is largely about quarantine life during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic, ruminating on the state of her isolation from her friends and loved ones, her mental health, and her impatience for life to return to "normal".
  • Massive Multiplayer Crossover: The video for "Boys" is basically a montage of at least 60 male music celebrities in full Female Gaze-y glory, including, but are not limited to: A.G. Cook, Oli Sykes, Joe Jonas, Max Hershenow, Charlie Puth, G-Eazy, Ezra Koenig, Rostam Batmanglij, Dan Smith, Flume, Wiz Khalifa, Ty Dolla $ign, Joey Bada$$, Tinie Tempah, Riz Ahmed (and the rest of the Swet Shop Boys), Taka Moriuchi, Carl Barat, Mac DeMarco, will.i.am, Tommy Cash, Diplo, Laurie Vincent, Tristan Evans and James McVey, and Vance Joy.
  • Minimalistic Cover Art:
    • The cover of True Romance is a picture of her with a white background. Sucker is also a picture of her, except with a pink background. Her singles, on the other hand, are a mix of this and Design Student's Orgasm.
    • BRAT plays this completely straight, being just a lime green background with "brat" written over it in Arial font. According to an interview with Vogue, Charli got very sick of female artists like her having to plaster their photographs over everything, including album covers, and went with something deliberately odd and confrontational "to trigger the idea of something being wrong."
  • Money Song: "Gold Coins." She also did a cover of "Money (That's What I Want)."
  • Mood Whiplash: Charli opens with "Next Level Charli," a loud, epic anthem celebrating the start of a giant party with fans, but is immediately followed up with "Gone," a noticeably more melancholy (if still booming) ballad about feeling overwhelmed in a crowd and wanting to leave.
  • Ms. Fanservice: She plays into this with her many appearances in music videos and televised performances. The Tokyo-set Video for "Boom Clap", where a stunningly gorgeous Charli jaunts around the streets of the city in tiny, mostly form-hugging attire (and at one point in what appears to be nothing more than a nightgown). She also posts sexually provocative images of herself on social media on a regular basis, and has a fondness for wearing sheer tops without a bra.
  • New Sound Album:
    • Sucker incorporates elements of pop-punk, power pop and dance-pop— genres not particularly heard before on True Romance.
    • The Vroom Vroom EP, produced by SOPHIE, is definitely bubblegum bass and pop, but has some influences from trap, grime, and even industrial hip hop. Following that was Number 1 Angel and the establishment of her longstanding relationship with the PC Music community (primarily its label founder A.G. Cook), with later projects Pop 2, Charli, and how i'm feeling now experimenting and adapting with their futuristic, quirky, and hyper-real brand of pop.
    • CRASH, is much more of a "poptastic" throwback record, eschewing the avant-garde, hyperpop sounds of the future for the vintage, 80's Synth-Pop-inspired sounds of the past.
    • BRAT completely eschews traditional pop formula for a more minimalist sound reminiscent of underground club music, returning to noisy and quirky hyperpop textures, but arranged to be her most intentionally repetitive, gritty, and mainstream-unfriendly release to date.
  • Non-Appearing Title: "Grins," "Cloud Aura," "Track 10," (despite being an alternate version of 'Blame It On Your Love'), "February 2017," "2099," and "c2.0."
  • Out-of-Genre Experience: "Need Ur Luv." It sounds like 50s doo-wop, which is completely unlike anything else she's done before.
  • Perky Goth: One of her looks (lots of black, dark lipstick).
  • Purple Is Powerful: Her live shows have a lot of purple lighting (see Color-Coded for Your Convenience).
  • Rearrange the Song: A.G. Cook (primary producer for much of Charli's work starting from Number 1 Angel onward) is fond of recycling past solo production from himself and Life Sim (who may be a separate, highly reclusive project or an alternate identity):
    • As explained in the liner notes, "Lipgloss" started as an unreleased Life Sim instrumental simply titled "Lightning," which then got edited and recycled by several producers including Cook and SOPHIE before reaching the final version on Number 1 Angel (all three are credited as producers). A few months later, Life Sim released an updated version of his original instrumental, now titled "Lightning Lipgloss Life."
    • "Track 10" from Pop 2 is a twofer: it's stated to be a remix of a previously unreleased track called "Blame It On Your Love," and part of its instrumental (from 2 minutes onwards) is a rearrangement of another track by Life Sim, "IDL." Hilariously enough, a finished version of the original "Blame It On Your Love" demo, now featuring Lizzo, was released as a single later on and included in the tracklist of Charli, meaning there's now two completely different official arrangements of the song across two projects.
    • "Next Level Charli" is effectively a Charli-tinged recreation of another A.G. Cook and Life Sim collaboration, "Big Bratt," from their 2015 release "Xtreme Mixology."
  • Repetitive Audio Glitch: Used to brief but creatively heartbreaking effect in "Lucky," where the vocals briefly skip at the line "You got no reception, you're brea-ea-king up..."
  • Revenge Ballad: "Just Desserts," a collaboration with Marina Diamandis, about getting revenge on a lover for an unspecified offence.
    Karma came around like I knew it would
    Like I knew it would
    And it feels so good when the shoe is put
    On the other foot
  • Revisiting the Roots:
    • Charli describes CRASH — on top of being a traditional Genre Throwback after a long string hyperpop projects — as being a case of this for herself. As it was her final record as part of her deal with Atlantic Records, Charli admits to approaching it as one last opportunity to utilize the label's maximist resources and create a more commercial-friendly pop album akin to when she first started out; an experiment to see if it can achieve mainstream attention that eluded her as someone who usually works on the experimental fringe of pop (this venture would be a successful one, as it became her most commercially successful album to date, and ironically kept her and Atlantic on good-enough terms for her to renew her contract for BRAT).
    • BRAT is a more holistic case for Charli, as while it's far from her usual pop-centric sound, it's more an evocation of club music that greatly influenced her during her youth, having been raised as a performer in the illegal rave scene in London during her teens.
  • Robot Girl: "Femmebot" gleefully toys with this imagery, using a ton of playful robot metaphors.
    Go fuck your prototype
    I’m an upgrade of your stereotype
    Don’t come with a guarantee
    I’ll use you up like you’re my battery
    I feel the sparks between us, electric shock
    Hot-wired if you mess it up, I’ll self-destruct
  • Sampling:
    • "Trophy" gets its namedrop from a sample from Pulp Fiction of Uma Thurman saying "I want that trophy."
    • "Unlock It" from Pop 2 borrows a few snippets from A.G. Cook's "Beautiful," including its Title Drop hook.
    • "Delicious" from the same album is briefly interrupted in the middle by a ringtone, which is a 3-second long snippet of none other than Charli's own "Boom Clap".
    • "Beg for You" samples "Cry for You" by September.
  • Sarcastic Title: True Romance is, ironically, mostly full of bitter post-breakup songs. (It's named after a Quentin Tarantino movie.)
  • Self-Backing Vocalist: "Grins" most prominently, and other songs.
  • Sequel Song:
    • "2099" to "1999," each on relative ends of the tracklist of Charli and both featuring Troye Sivan. While "1999" is a straightforward throwback to nostalgic pop culture, "2099" is a chaotic, avant-garde depiction of what we can assume Charli believes is in store for the distant future of music.
    • "c2.0" of how i'm feeling now is a direct continuation of "Click" from Charli, directly sampling portions of its distorted production and vocal hooks. Whereas "Click" is a Boastful Rap about Charli being with her clique, "c2.0" is more of her reminiscing about them, missing them as a result of their self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Sexy Packaging: Wears a bikini on the cover of CRASH, though there's a bit of Fan Disservice, since she's just been hit by a car and is covered in blood.
  • Sexy Schoolwoman: She often wears plaid skirts (and not just in the "Fancy" video) despite being in her early 20s. (However, she really did go to an elite boarding school.)
  • Shout-Out:
    Yeah, I wanna dance to me
    I wanna dance to A.G.
    I wanna dance with George
    I wanna dance to SOPHIE
    I wanna dance to HudMo
  • Silly Love Songs: "Boom Clap," "You're the One," "What I Like," "SuperLove," “Unlock It.”
  • Singer Namedrop:
    • Her PC Music-era singles and mixtapes use this liberally in the form of either "It's Charli, Baby," or a stuttered “XCX” tag resembling a radio call out.
    • Lots of it on “I Got It,” including Pabllo Vittar using the Portuguese pronunciation of XCX.
    • The coda of "New Shapes" has a backing voice muttering "Charli, Caroline, Chris" (including the track's two featured artists, Caroline Polachek and Christine and the Queens).
  • Stylistic Suck: Downplayed as it's not made to sound bad, but how i'm feeling now in general is a lot less polished in its production and mixing than previous endeavors, featuring a more lo-fi "bedroom pop" aesthetic in part due to it being created during COVID-19 lockdown, and in a very short 6-week timespan.
  • Three Minutes of Writhing: Not usually in her videos, but her performance of "Need Ur Love" on the Late Show definitely was (on top of a piano, no less).
  • Title Track:
    • The first track off of her 2014 album, Sucker, is well... named just that.
    • The Vroom Vroom EP similarly begins with the titular track.
  • Trademark Favourite Food: Apparently she really likes pizza. As in, enough to eat a whole one by herself.
  • Visual Pun: The cover for her single with Marina and the Diamonds, "Just Desserts," is ... a hand holding an ice cream cone. Bonus points for the intentional misspelling.
  • "X" Makes Anything Cool: The name "XCX" doesn't really mean anything; it just sounds a lot cooler than "Aitchison," a clunky, difficult name for a pop star.
    "It stands for Kiss Charli Kiss, which is fucking lame. It used to be my handle on MSN Messenger. Then I got signed and thought, "Maybe I need to make it cooler," so I told the record label it stood for X-rated Cunt X-rated."
  • A Wild Rapper Appears!: Charli loves collaborating with fellow artists, and starting around Number 1 Angel onwards, she's developed a feature-heavy ethos for her projects comparable to mainstream rappers.
    • Brooke Candy appears in "Cloud Aura," a lone R&B song on a synthpop album.
    • Danny Brown shows up on the remix of "What I Like."
    • Lil Yachty in "After The Afterparty."
    • CupcakKe stands out for getting two full verses in “Lipgloss” on Number 1 Angel, a verse in “I Got It” on Pop 2 and a verse in "Shake It" on Charli.
    • Number 1 Angel also has rap verses from Starrah and Raye, while Pop 2 has verses from Brooke Candy, Mykki Blanco, Tommy Cash, and Jay Park.
    • "Shake It" is a love letter to this trope: the song was specifically constructed to barely feature Charli and to highlight the four featured verses: Big Freedia, CupcakKe, Brooke Candy, and Pabllo Vittar.
    • Charli also features rap verses from Kim Petras, Tommy Cash, and Lizzo.
    • Subverted on both mixtapes and Charli by many features with other singers rather than rappers.

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