Music
The story of Charli XCX in 10 essential songs
She's the Home Counties girl pushing pop to the edge of the avant-garde. Let's run down Charli's best moments to date.
Lockdown is not a competition. But if it were, Charli XCX would definitely be winning. How I’m Feeling Now, her fourth official album, was made entirely in and about this strange period. On April 6 2020, Charli announced that she would be making a full LP while sheltering in her LA home. The entire project, artwork included, was birthed on May 15. That she pulled this off says a lot about Charli XCX the artist. She is astonishingly prolific; plugged-in to a fault and dripping in relevance.
Precocious doesn’t cut it. A child of MySpace, by aged 14 she’d persuaded her parents to lend her the money to record her first album. By 16, they were driving her from leafy Hertfordshire to perform at illegal East London nu-rave parties.
Charli XCX has slowly and organically transitioned into a pop behemoth, all whilst doing what countless other artists have tried and failed at – straddling chart pop’s hyper-mainstream and simultaneously being embraced by the underbelly. A skilled collaborator, she’s just as at home chopping up weird bleeps and angular synths with Mykki Blanco as she is belting out a power ballad with Carly Rae Jepsen. Meanwhile, her skills both in front of and behind the mic allow for an autonomy that finds Charli XCX at a point where she gets to call the shots and play with the possibilities of what pop might achieve.
We take a look at 10 key tracks and moments that created modern pop’s greatest outlier on the inside.
1. Icona Pop ft. Charli XCX – I Love It
Cop to it or not, chances are you do love it. This 2012 earworm of punk-pop sing-along dominated popular culture in the heady days of the London Olympics, Girls and Gangnam Style. A pair of complete unknowns managed to cut through thanks to the writing prowess of a 19-year-old Charli who gifted it to them after deciding she didn’t see the track working alongside her own material. All bratty middle finger, hedonism and electro-maximalism, it is signature XCX. You can picture a young Charli in Buffalo boots in a board room, screaming at some music exec, “You’re from the '70s but I’m a '90s bitch".
2. Iggy Azalea ft Charli XCX – Fancy
A full two years on, Charli returned to remind the globe that she knew her way around a pop tune. She’d been beavering in the studio, finding synergy with LA super-producer Ariel Reichstad, and releasing debut album True Romance; but this had all been rather frustratingly overshadowed by the advert-friendly omnipresence of I Love It. Fancy’s hook and Clueless-nostalgia video saw the track nominated for two Grammy’s; it was one of the year’s biggest-selling singles worldwide, becoming Charli’s first number one on the Billboard charts and sitting there for seven weeks.
3. Boom Clap
The most high-profile offering from XCX’s second studio album, Sucker, 2014's Boom Clap is an anthemic ode to all-consuming cliche-heavy first crushes. It was also Charli’s first truly convincing solo hit. Released in conjunction with emo-teen romance flick The Fault In Our Stars, it achieved the requisite radio-friendly accessibility. But it also did what Charli does best, trojan-horsing her way into summer playlists with something sophisticated in its woozy electropulses, re-imagining the montage-ready sounds of Roxette for a new decade.
4. Vroom Vroom
This was Charli’s Lemonade or Justified moment. The single accompanied an EP of the same name and was widely recognised as a new no-fucks-given mission statement. It heralded the launch of her own record label, Vroom Vroom Recordings. It was also the beginning of a career-long creative partnership with electronic music’s enfants terribles, Sophie and AG Cook. If this was Charli putting her stick in the ground then she was having fun with it; making a sort-of trash-pop high-art. Not many girls from the home counties can pull off a line like “Lavender Lamborghini/Roll up in a blue bikini...'
5. 3am (Pull Up) ft MO
If mainstream critics and fans were thrown by the unapologetic synthy saccharine on steroids that Vroom Vroom introduced then they would just have to get used to it. Charli’s self-proclaimed ‘project’ (somewhere between a mixtape and an album?), No 1 Angel, saw her creative partnership with the PC Music clan continue, along with the avant garden approach that accompanied. Featuring Swedish pop princess of the moment, MØ, 3am (Pull Up) served as a reminder of Charli’s skills as a collaborator. It was also a whole lot of fun.
6. Boys
Charli XCX is not happy unless she’s up-ending your expectations. Just as the world thought she was now all about PVC and upsetting her parents, in 2017 she comes out with a single that’s so damn cute you can’t help but smile. The ode to daydreaming about high school hotties is a radio playlister’s wet dream. Plus, the video is pure female gaze – again Charli takes a sophisticated and progressive concept and wraps it up in a pink pop bow. It features Diplo using puppies as dumbbells and Stormzy eating cereal. What’s not to love?!
7. Track 10
Bona fide fans will recognise this closer to the Pop2 mixtape as the superior first iteration of Charli’s Lizzo duet, Blame It On Your Love. Her second mixtape of 2017 came with an accompanying note: “I was so lost for a while with who I was … fuck playing the game”. This mixtape might just have been the pinnacle of her break for complete freedom and pop futurism; an experimental statement on what mainstream music could sound like freed from the shackles of major label hedge-betting. And it sounded collaborative, angular and very very noisy.
8. Shake It ft. Big Freedia, Brooke Candy, CupcakKe & Pabllo Vittar
Some critics have argued that XCX’x third studio album, Charli, saw her flinch in the face of pressure to pander to the mainstream. Or perhaps she was just creatively content and doing exactly what she felt like doing when she felt like doing it. Either way, it would be impossible to argue that this mind-bending four minutes of ASMR-meets-strip club sleeze is anything other than Charli playing ultimate edge lord with the most maverick of motley crews.
9. Gone ft Christine and the Queens
This was the third single from Charli and found XCX meet her match with Christine and the Queens. The boiling and insatiable energy of both artists bursts from the speakers and offers a dreamy vision of what female pop stars look and sound like now. The accompanying thrilling video took the song’s central imagery to a whole new level: two outsider artists bound in chains and sick to death of being told what to do. They are bonded by rage. A mood for our times.
10. claws
Is this the first all-out love song that Charli has written since finding her sweet spot in terms of her own sound and creative freedoms? Written with kindred spirits 100 Gecs, it is sweet, heady and safe love through the XCX lens of hyper-digital and noisy futurism. Made in isolation with its subject. In the ultimate spirit of experimentation Charli released a WeTransfer link to the video so that fans could edit to their heart’s content.
Like Red Bull Music on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @RedBullMusicUK