It's officially BRAT summer, which means it's time to start bumpin' that (interpret however you like), get jealous, act confident, be unnecessarily honest and maybe even have some healing confrontations with your more complicated friends. The current Charli XCX renaissance feels like it's been a long time coming for her day-one fans; with the release of BRAT, it seems like the world has finally caught up to Charlotte Aitchison.
For those newly struck by Charli's chartreuse fever and unsure of where to start with her messy, joyous catalogue, we've decided to put together a helpful (and totally subjective) ranking of her six studio albums and two mixtapes. Every Charli project has something to offer, and while some of her experiments have stood the test of time better than others, there are few modern pop catalogues quite as sneakily influential.
Here are Charli XCX's albums ranked from worst to best.
8. Sucker (2014)
Charli XCX doesn't much like Sucker. Well, maybe that's not entirely fair — her feelings about the album might be more complicated than that. What Charli really doesn't like is "Boom Clap," the song that's come to define her sophomore record (despite it sounding little like anything else on it) and remains her biggest crossover moment to date. If there's one Charli song that your parents or normie co-workers might recognize, it's "Boom Clap." The album that surrounds "Boom Clap" is as much an outlier in Charli's discography, the only record she's made that looks backward more than it does forward, drawing inspiration from riot grrrl, neutered blog pop and British punk. The whole thing feels a bit sweaty and contrived — a rash, perhaps panicky turn away from the forward-thinking digital splendour of True Romance. It's become a strange, chintzy speed bump in an otherwise momentum-obsessed catalogue.
7. Number 1 Angel (2017)
Number 1 Angel is pretty beloved by a certain subset of Charli fans, but I just don't hear it. Released a few months prior to the earth-shifting Pop 2, the mixtape feels slight in comparison, a testing ground for ideas and sensations that Charli and her collaborators would eventually indulge more deeply. The whole thing plays like a tasting menu before the beautifully bonkers, SOPHIE-co-produced meal that is "Lipgloss," which features gnarly, hilarious verses from Cupcakke and a sense of frantic sonic weight that the rest of Number 1 Angel can't replicate. While it helped represent a new, post-"Vroom Vroom" vision of Charli's sound, it would eventually be overshadowed by what came next.
6. Charli (2019)
There's nothing wrong with Charli's self-titled album — it's well-written, well-produced, and the guest list is a who's who of alternative pop stars. But there's little here she hasn't done better elsewhere (save for perhaps the rap posse cut "Shake It," which is a fun outlier). The youthful nostalgia of "1999" was done with far more nuance on "Rewind"; the cheeky robo pop of "Click" has less vroom than "Vroom Vroom"; "Blame It on Your Love" adds EDM clichés to Pop 2's already-perfect-as-is "Track 10." Charli is a strong album that, taken within the context of the discography, feels transitional.
5. CRASH (2022)
Charli XCX started her career by writing hits for other artists; on CRASH, she tried to have hits for herself. While the lyrics reflect the messiness of her private life, the music itself is squeaky clean mainstream pop, with some of the most instantly catchy hooks in her catalogue. She's long cited '80s and '90s radio icons like Britney Spears and Janet Jackson as her influences, but it wasn't until "Good Ones" and "Used to Know Me" that she truly embodied the immediate, uncomplicated pleasures of those predecessors. The only real downfall of CRASH is not the album itself, but how it was received: despite sounding like hits, none of the singles actually were hits, making it feel like the album never quite fulfilled its purpose.
4. True Romance (2013)
Charli was still a teenager when she started working on True Romance, and you can tell. The album is wildly uneven, dropping off a cliff in its second half; its experiments are sometimes clumsy and vaguely embarrassing; the songwriting swings between overly flowery and too blunt. And yet, it just kinda works. For someone so young, Charli had a distinctive and clear-eyed sense of taste, even if, yes, it led her to a Brooke Candy collab or two. To this day, True Romance contains some of her best songs — "Nuclear Seasons," "Take My Hand," "You (Ha Ha Ha)," "What I Like," "Stay Away" — and it accesses a lush, gothic sense of (true) romance that her music would eventually lose as she matured. Nothing feels so enormous as being a teenager, and True Romance captured Charli at a moment of total abandon and big emotion. She would top it eventually, but there's still nothing else in her catalogue that feels quite like it.
3. Pop 2 (2017)
While "Vroom Vroom" was the (critically misunderstood) ignition, Pop 2 is where Charli's vision of pop's future took flight, leaving earth behind for the alien sensations and pearlescent starlight of deep space. It remains the platonic ideal of PC Music's influence, a glittering showcase for the collective's satellite stars and a statement of intent that's palatable enough to pull in those turned off by the label's more transgressive acts. It's not quite perfect — as is often true of Charli's work, some of the guests are grating earsores — but, at a concise 10 tracks, it feels like a super-concentrated elixir of everything that makes Charli so exciting. Mindless party chatter and sexual come-ons rub up against heart-stopping romantic stakes and experimental excursions. The frictious majesty of closer "Track 10" remains a miracle in its own right, and its inclusion alone would make Pop 2 a high water mark in Charli's catalogue — thank God the rest of it is so good as well.
2. how i'm feeling now (2020)
Written and recorded in the early weeks of COVID-19 lockdowns and released just two months into the pandemic, how i'm feeling now is one of the defining works of that moment. The lyrics speak directly to the fears and frustrations of lockdown, although in broad enough terms that they still resonate years later: she sparkles like a "pink diamond in the dark" amidst a cacophony of slicing synths; she feels like she's "about to detonate" against a bittersweet backdrop of twinkling textures; she yearns for "anthems, late nights, my friends, New York" over a banging club beat. It's an aching, passionate plea for catharsis for anyone who has ever felt stifled and unfilled.
1. BRAT (2024)
It might feel wild to declare an album that's been out less than a month as the best in an artist's catalogue, but such is the power of BRAT. Charli's sixth studio album hit the internet like a chartreuse wave, sweeping all doubters and maybe even a few dedicated haters into its churning waters. After more than a decade spent adding and subtracting from her complex pop equations, BRAT feels like Charli and her collaborators have finally landed on an answer. It's both Charli's most insolent and mature record, a beautiful confluence that brings depth to the concept of bratdom — in its self-involved lashing out, it's an admittance of vulnerability as much as it is a show of bravado. Charli's songwriting has never been more complex and illuminating, her previously syllable-dependent style being burned away in favour of plainspoken, stream-of-consciousness purity. That songs as vulnerable, strange and complicated as "I think about it all the time" (a strong dark-horse contender for Charli's best song) and "Apple" (apples and airports, apples and airports) can slot in next to brash fire-breathers like "Von dutch" and "Club classics" is a testament to Charli's emotional clarity this time around. Every feeling, noble or not, is worth exploring and explaining. Everything is important, everything is painful, everything is romantic.