Charli XCX's "party 4 u" is for the 365 party girls; the sad girls; the girls who can't fully lose themselves in dancing and strobe lights and confetti because they're focused only on whether one special person will walk through the door and join them on the dancefloor.
In celebration of the five-year anniversary of her fifth album how i'm feeling now, our electropop princess is finally releasing a music video for the track. The timing also coincides with the emergence of the "party 4 u"-based TikTok trend, in which social media users explore the hyper-specific nostalgic scenarios the song conjures up for them — from watching your crush kiss someone else from across the room to crying in an Uber on the way home — and the confusing shame that comes with it all.
The music video immediately tosses us into the morning after one such bittersweet party. It opens with green and pink-tinged flashes, with quick cuts tossing us between close-ups of a confetti-covered floor, a lone pink balloon, and Charli's eyes, coated in silver eyeshadow and smudged mascara.
Most of the video takes place on a rural road, as Charli ambles down the street in a chic polka-dot dress, her outfit increasingly unravelling until she's left in a satiny white bra and underwear. In the background appears a billboard of her face, which she proceeds to tear up and deface with black paint and a lighter. Her enlarged eyes look out at us from the ad, and at herself watching, from behind the flames; at a moment when everyone may be wondering what comes next after BRAT, Charli also seems to be wondering the same thing.
With the skyrocketing success of her most recent album, Charli has cemented herself as the voice of a party-loving generation, but her anthems have never been just mind-numbingly hedonistic. If there's anything the resurgence of "party 4 u" proves, it's that there's still a longing for sincerity in a time when so much seems to be tainted with an apathetic irony.