There has always been a contradiction at the core of Charli and at the core of why we love her; she has always wanted to be both a pop megastar and indie cool. Traditionally, she has resolved that by alternating albums – one for the masses and one for herself. brat has broken that mold, but not through the compromise you would expect, but instead by being her best music yet from either perspective.
The pop here is otherworldly. The beat of “B2b” is busted. Her ear for music is freer than it has ever been and these songs are absolutely bursting at the seams with fishhooks to pull you somewhere new. The single “Von dutch” is propulsive and cinematic. The switch in “365” blew me away and her reworking of the opener “360” into something new for the closer is fun, not just for the device, but for how it gives us two classic pop songs.
She’s got good variety and good pace changes song-to-song as well. Flipping the slower, more FKA “everything is romantic” to the peppier “Rewind” works well and the whiplash of moving from motherhood in “I think about it all the time” to the cocaine of “365” is an excellent jolt.
brat has Charli committing much more to storytelling than before. The metagame of pop is parasocial at the moment and Charli has never been so open as she is here. The honesty is devastating in “So I,” her song for her long time collaborator SOPHIE who died in 2021.
“Girl, so confusing” might have Lorde references meant for internet detectives but the introspection grounds the album as a whole and it’s compelling to hear her go through her vulnerabilities. It’s also just absurdly good pop. Similarly, “I think about it all the time” does a lot to feed the fanbase but it’s also very clever music and I love the shifting of the word baby. Some of the lyrics really hit even if I feel that we all deserve better than someone from The 1975 though. She’s a little out of her element in the storytelling of “Mean girls” but everything is forgiven of truly great pop.
She also makes the pop star positioning into explicit text throughout the album, especially in the overwrought video for “360.” The song has some great pop rap from her though and some True Romance fragments that I loved to see.
Seeing her in this and in “Von dutch” really bring home just how far Charli has come though. She has dramatically matured from the time of “SuperLove” or even “Boom Clap” and yet brat is not about Charli bending herself to fit the world, as so many of her weaker ventures seemed to be. This is instead the moment where the world has finally begun to catch up with Charli.
Cowboy Carter starts on the wrong foot with “AMERIICAN REQUIEM”. I have never come across a music trend I dislike as much as pop music’s current fascination with mining out old hits. It made the last Ariana album unlistenable. There’s nothing clever about recognizing some of the most famous music of the past few decades and I’m insulted by pop musicians who think so little of me.
It’s further weakened by how thoughtless the samples are. If Beyoncé wanted to make an arena rock album, I would have found that exciting but the best thing I can say about adding Who samples to an ostensibly country album is that they just don’t fit.
This is the first question I run into when I try to be charitable to this album and I really want to be charitable to this album. I think Southern Beyoncé is her best version. I love “FORMATION”, I love her leaning into this identity, I love a lot of those pieces that come through in this album, even as I struggle with my dislike of the album as a whole.
This question is whether to approach the album as a country album or a Beyoncé album. I was really hoping for the former. I wanted her to further the shake-up of a moving but reactionary genre. I’m not going to fault her for choosing the latter though, especially when some of her Beyoncé music here is very good.
She sings well in “BODYGUARD” and the languorousness is so skillful. There’s no country in the track but good music is good music. “TYRANT” also doesn’t really fit in but is great pop. The beat is propulsive and giddy-up is a great call. it reminds me of “Savage” and I’d love to see her do more of this.
But even in her comfort zone, we start to see how overstuffed this album is. “II HANDS II HEAVEN” is too standard a ballad. “SPAGHETII” tries for a grit and menace that I know that Beyoncé has but cannot seem to bring to bear here. “LEVIIS JEANS” has just a touch of country but it’s too light to be interesting and the Post Malone feature is subpar and doesn’t fit with the album at all.
Too much of the country doesn’t hold up as well. “DESERT EAGLE” starts with a fantastic muddy blues guitar but it’s not allowed to grow over the course of the song and Beyoncé puts nothing interesting or fitting over it. The two parts don’t work together at all. It transitions very well into “RIIVERDANCE” though, which in turn takes an interesting concept but then doesn’t really do anything much with it. I needed less repetition from it. It’s fun guitar work but then the pop overwhelms it. Even ”16 CARRIAGES” is weak. It could have been interesting with Beyoncé’s voice over some simple instrumentation, it could have been what this album promised but there’s no evolution and so it runs out. She gets a lot of emotion into the ballad though
I really appreciate bringing Willie Jones in for “JUST FOR FUN”, but I would have liked him to have more space. It’s a good country track but his fragment stands out for being normal. I would have liked Beyoncé to try a bit of country singing herself. She was excellent in “Savage” for really leaning into triple-time and the album would have done better for a bit of the same here. This results in Miley outsinging her a bit on “II MOST WANTED”. Country always does well for some roughness in the vocals and Beyoncé is too smooth. I would like this track but the two voices jar against each other. I would have preferred just Miley on this.
There’s some solid music in the country turn though. “PROTECTOR” is what the album should have been, country elevated by Beyoncé many skills and a personal track to boot. It’s a great track and you feel the South in it. The rhyme of protector and projector is too flat but that’s a minor burr in a great song.
“DAUGHTER” is also quite good I really like the folk strings in the background and the personal story. Her flow is great and when she accelerates a minute in, that works very well. I see the opera turn as a poorly integrated swerve but the song does a lot of things well.
I also like the country twanging in “ALLIGATOR TEARS”. This is more of the sound that I was hoping for. She brings herself into it. The result is less modern than I expected, it feels like something off a Prince album more than anything, but that’s interesting in itself.
“TEXAS HOLD EM” is a standout and a great choice for a single. It’s a fun, modern take on country. It uses her voice very well. It’s not very complicated but it’s fun enough to forgive that and that fun is most of what is missing from this album. Early Beyoncé used to be fun and I really miss that. This album is largely far too serious and doesn’t justify it.
I’m glad then that she highlights “YA YA.” It rocks a lot more than the majority of the filler in this album. It’s unfortunate then that it’s music that Janelle Monáe did a decade earlier and did better. It’s a good song but overlong and overstuffed and the “Good Vibrations” interlude is unnecessary garbage.
This mining of music is at its worst in the two covers. “BLACKBIIRD” might have been something interesting when you take the civil rights history of the song and the collective singing but honestly the Beatles’ politics were always shallow and Beyoncé’s branded politics are not much deeper. More fatally though, she’s overproduced and overworked it. It’s a gentle song, it needs to be handled with delicacy and Beyoncé is clearly not in the mood for that with this album. Also, I still have no idea why there’s so much British rock in this album.
It’s “JOLENE” that’s unforgivable though. I hate “JOLENE” enough to ruin the whole album. To reframe the song in this manner is incredibly disrespectful and just incredibly dumb. The original was startling in its sincerity and its vulnerability. To convert it in the most trite girl-power framing possible is to miss the point. It would be unbelievable from the maker of the “Run the World (Girls)”, the pinnacle of the girl-power statement, were it not for the cynicism of the rest of this album.
Beyoncé’s goal with this album is not to push herself sonically or tune into her Southern roots or even to make great music. It is to consume country music with a look both to her legacy and to her bottom line. That’s why there’s a discourse-feeder like “JOLENE,” that’s why the Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton interludes are here, that’s why the album is overstuffed enough to game the charts and most damningly that’s why the album isn’t fun.
It largely succeeded at the goal too. It made a splash, it charted well and it might define an era for her. There’s even some solid music scattered here and there. I’d just like it if the music were the goal next time instead of merely the means to such an empty end.
LE SSERAFIM is quite comfortably my favorite thing in K-Pop right now. Their fashion and choreography are immaculate, their attitude is fully on-point and their pop is just so much more experimental than anyone else in the space. You see this in their K-Pop cuts. “Eve, Psyche & The Bluebeard’s Wife” and “UNFORGIVEN” are K-Pop chartbusters and rightfully so but you can see how omnivorous their taste is. The tracks constantly surprise with unexpected beats and breaks and they pull from a ton of influences.
They’re even willing to play out of K-Pop outright. “Blue Flame” is very “American Boy” and the strong “FEARNOT” could be a Taylor track. Their ear is evident across the album. Like Seo Taiji, it’s not just that they take many inspirations but that their ear for good music is impeccable and their ability to consume and integrate many sources is incredible. That they can do all of this and package it with the best K-Pop visuals that I have ever seen is absurd. There’s still a lot of roughness to this album and it’s somewhat of a loose bag but this is as exciting of a statement as you’ll get.
Sometimes, you just cannot force a square peg into a round hole. This could have been a bedroom pop album in the way of something like Clairo’s debut album. That would have allowed her to deliver something short and focused and something that would stay more tightly defined within the sound that she got traction with. Heaven knows clearly has larger pop ambitions and while that might very well be in her future, the result right now is an album with plenty of strong moments, but not enough interesting music to carry the full project.
This comes up particularly strongly in the songs with features. You can see how these were designed for crossover appeal. However, the Central Cee verse just drags down a song with clever moments, but one that was already struggling to hold up its own weight. Similarly, I felt that the Ice Spice feature, while a cultural moment for both of them, is not one of her best.
PinkPantheress has moments, especially in songs like “Feelings”, with very compelling sounds and she’s still way too exciting to write off, but this album isn’t the breakout she wanted it to be.
Olivia Rodrigo is very young and there’s nothing that’ll make you feel old quicker than a young popstar. Much of the best music is about bad decisions. “bad idea right?” manages to fall on the right side of making it sound fun. Even better is the soft vocalizing going into grunge. She moves into punk rock with this album and it suits her well. The rock is particularly good in the highlight of the album “ballad of a homeschooled girl.” She hits the chorus perfectly and the stripped-down storytelling is excellent. This is great lo-fi rock and shows her to her best.
“get him back” leans even harder into the mistakes of youth and ends up unconvincing. The rock is fun and the double meaning is cute, but there could have been a fun tension between the two halves of the song and instead it’s just cliche. This tendency towards easy-to-consume narratives regularly brings the album down. “all-american bitch” gestures to Didion (even if the essay has something very different to say), but there’s an honesty in Didion that you don’t see here. SOUR was a sharper, more pointed album and one that had a central motivation that gave Rodrigo a way to be honest. GUTS misses that and so leans hard on tropes instead.
I do really like the move to rock and to punk though. The ballads here like “teenage dream” and “making the bed” do nothing for me, but when she rocks out, she has fun and energy and it’s a great look for her. She’s big enough now to be able to take some risks as she fully defines herself and this was one that paid off magnificently.
5 songs on one EP, 2 great, 2 good and 1 okay. “Obsessed” has a wonderful egotism that, along with a slight hitch, makes the chorus an instant earworm. “2 die 4” works well with Charli and songs benefit from truly excellent, truly conceited pop conceits.
“i got it bad” and “it could’ve been you” are both solid pop bangers. “Nothing On (But the Radio)” is a little better than the Gaga original, but still lacking in ideas. I’d rather not have lost two and a half of a twelve minute EP to something so uninspired, but I guess a good cover might at least bring some people in.
Short, sparkling and a little flawed, AR comes in, iridescent as a bubble and pops. This is the kind of moment of time that we listen to pop for. I just wish that music video was better.
This is the sunniest pop that I’ve heard in quite a while. NewJeans are the most unrepentantly fun pop group out there. They’re making bright music and they bring visuals to boot. You cannot skip the videos if you’re checking out this band, they’re an essential part of the experience.
The singles are what make the EP. They’re the best of the songs and they’re immaculately choreographed. The off-cuts are quite forgettable, but Lisbon has never looked so summery as in “Super Shy” and that dance move with the iPhone in “ETA” gets me every time. Even visual-free, this would be immaculate pop, but when you take them at their whole, they are spectacular.
“Girls” is an incredible song. It’s right there in the sweet spot of smart and dumb and infectious as all get-out. Every single line in this track is all of these at once and horny as hell. This is “Short Skirt / Long Jacket” for the current moment and a much better song in every way. It’s funny, it’s great club music and it’s infinitely quotable. This is the rare song that knows what it wants to be and does it perfectly.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album is more grating than otherwise. “Sex” is almost a real song but ends up short and the rest aren’t even that. Spend your time with “Girls” instead.
How high is your tolerance for memery? Unless you’ve been totally fried by the internet, it’s probably not quite high enough for 100 gecs. This is music for the terminally online made by the terminally online. It’s loud and noisy and it can be very stupid and being stupid is often the point, but it’s still stupid. For all of that though, it can still sometimes come out with something that changes your life.
“Doritos and Fritos” is what I’m talking about. It skids around the place and memes a lot more than it really should, but there are really interesting fragments studded in there. They just have a much better ear for music than your typical hyperpop band.
In particular, “Dumbest Girl Alive” is incredible. It’s got great lyrics, you can tell that the writers have the internet as their first language. “Put emojis on my grave / I’m the dumbest girl alive” is immediately memorable and “Text, text, text, text, like you’re tryna start a fight / Yeah, I’ll fuckin’ text you back, I’m the dumbest girl alive” is an excellent distillation of the song.
For all that though, the lyrics are much less interesting than what the band does sonically. The alt-rock of my adolescence was something of a cultural wasteland, but it has proved to be incredibly fertile raw material for the musicians of today and 100 gecs take that to the extreme.
Similarly, “Billy Knows Jamie” could have been scoped by Trent Reznor. The production throughout is just the most absurd showcase of talent. Something like “Hollywood Baby” is so clearly intelligent that no posturing can diminish it.
“Frog on the Floor” and “I Got My Tooth Removed” both play much closer to the line though. The edge between dumb and good gets very fine with this album and both of these songs are constantly teetering on both sides of the ledge. “One Million Dollars” has fallen right off though. There’s just not much that’s actually interesting in that song, just a lot of played out sounds mixed together in a rather boring way.
10,000 gecs is an uneven album, but it’s impossible to imagine an album like this that’s not. If you’re willing to let it bounce off the wall, you’ll find a lot to love on the rebound. Just don’t get square in its path.
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