Charli XCX revinvents Remix Albums: BRAT Summer Stats and Strategies
Charli XCX’s effect on popular culture with her ‘BRAT’ green energy has been enormous. Now with her new release Charli XCX revinvents remix albums. Learn the strategies and stats behind BRAT Summer.
Charli XCX revinvents Remix Albums
by Harry Levin via Chartmetric
Brat summer is not over.
Yes, the temperature may be dropping in the northern hemisphere as the leaves change to red, orange, and yellow. But popular culture is still drenched in the slime green that Charli XCX doused on the cover of her world-shifting album, BRAT.
The endurance of the British singer, songwriter, and pop sensation’s season of dominance is dictated by one person: Charli.
First of all, to say her summer was ending just before she brought her slinky, sexy dance beats on her SWEAT tour with Troye Sivan is nonsensical. All 22 dates of the North American run were sold out totalling 400.3k tickets. Next month, her solo arena run in the UK is sold out as well.
Secondly, Charli kept her summer going by releasing Brat and it’s completely different but its also still brat.
To decipher her plain nomenclature, technically this is a remix album for BRAT. On Spotify, the release features the 15 tracks from the original album, the three extra tracks from the extended edition of BRAT—Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not—and 17 more new songs.
Well, the 17 songs aren’t just “new.” They are completely different (but also still brat). All of them are fresh takes on tracks from the previous two iterations of the album. Charli brought in an all-star team of collaborators including Billie Eilish, Caroline Polachek, The 1975, Jon Hopkins, and Ariana Grande to lend their sonic coloring to the brat-green energy.
The essence of “re-releasing” tracks with a new twist is what would classify this latest version as a remix album, and quite commonly (especially in the streaming era) artists share remix albums or extended albums like an extra piece of content to keep the attention on the original release.
Charli absolutely sustained attention from her remix album. Since she announced “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde” on June 20, which began the rollout, her Instagram followers have grown from 4.8 million to her current peak of 6.5 million. She didn’t gain that many followers in the previous six years. She also went from being on 383 million Spotify playlists to now being on 529 million, once again her highest number ever.
What’s impressive and original about Charli’s idea of a remix album is that every track is a new piece of work. They expand on what the original was through the lens of the collaborator’s creativity without diluting its initial identity. Sometimes there are verses written by the collaborators. Other times there’s a whole new drumbeat. But no matter what, there is a new aesthetic in the song that feeds brat energy.
By contrast, one idea of an extended version that’s common in 2024 can be seen in Noah Kahan’s Stick Season (Forever). This is the third version of the modern folk star’s 2022 album to be released, and this one is especially akin to Charli’s latest because Noah invited guests to sing on new versions of his old songs.
Post Malone, Brandi Carlile, Gracie Abrams, and more lent their vocals to these new additions. But that’s all. There are no new verses. Just a bunch of A-list singers covering Noah’s words and melodies or singing in harmony. This has led to some major charting tracks like “Northern Attitude (with Hozier)” clearing 346 million streams. But without any unique contributions, the star power, rather than creativity, is fueling interest.
Conversely, the common remix album format that sees the most change to the original music is found in the electronic realm. In listening to the remix package for “Strobe” deadmau5 shared in 2016, the five new versions could easily be mistaken for new music. They have moments where they feature the original, iconic chord progression, but everything else from the drumbeat to the melodies is different.
Enter Charli. The full collection of Brat and it’s completely different but its also still brat is the complete manifestation of her perspective that songs are “endless and have the possibility to be continuously broken down, reworked, changed, morphed, mutilated into something completely unrecognizable.”
“Reworked, changed, morphed, and mutilated,” are ideal words to describe what happened to the original BRAT tracks.
The new “everything is romantic” was morphed from hard-hitting speed garage to a minimalist dance tune with Caroline Polachek’s operatic vocalizations providing the romance aloft Charli’s original lyrics. The pop-rock idols The 1975 and electronic composer Jon Hopkins mutilated “I might say something stupid” by doubling the original’s length, swapping on-the-beat keyboard chords for a throbbing ambient electronic foundation, and mixing Matty Healy’s voice onto Charli’s to make a new (and effected) musical solution.
When Brat and it’s completely different but its also still brat was released on October 14, 2024, Charli had 39.6 million Spotify monthly listeners, more than all 19 collaborators on the record except two. This proves Charli did not choose her partners on this record based on how it would benefit her. They had far more to gain than she did in contributing as seen in the chart below. She gained the opportunity to work with different artists and expand the meaning of BRAT beyond what anyone considered before.
The Brat Bump
Of course, Charli’s collaborators influenced the bump in streaming numbers as well. “Guess featuring billie eilish,” gave her the biggest boost throughout the entire BRAT campaign. After coming out on August 1, the tantalizing dance record has 293.2 million plays, and between August 1 and August 31, Charli’s monthly listeners grew from 24.4 million to 46.5 million. It’s Charli’s second-highest streamed track behind her 2014 single, “Boom Clap” with 459.3 million.
But as much as Billie and her 107.7 million listeners at the time served Charli’s growth, the success of Brat and it’s completely different but its also still brat goes beyond star power.
Along with releasing the new “Guess” Charli shared two other remixes from the album ahead of the main drop: “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde” and “Talk talk featuring troye sivan.” Both of these had unique implications.
For Lorde, there was a longstanding conflict between the two that was officially squashed on the remix. Herein, Lorde describes her own difficult emotions around their relationship but closes by saying “Cause I Ride For You Charli.” More than the fact that Lorde retains her own massive audience, reconciliation in music has always been heartening to listeners and now this remix is the second-highest performing on the record with 81.6 million streams.
Troye Sivan was a smart choice to release as a single because he was about to join Charli on tour. If anyone was on the fence about buying tickets, hearing Troye’s piano-house take on the upbeat jam, “Talk Talk,” let everyone know exactly what they would be missing.
Riding this upward momentum (that built upon the existing hype around BRAT), the remix album got 132,007,546 total streams in its first week and the original got 82,561,749. Yes, over 50 million from the remix album came from Billie and Ariana Grande’s features, but the remix streams were higher or within a million for almost every track on the original. The only remixes that didn’t do as well as the first were the two that were released before BRAT: “Von dutch a.g. cook remix featuring addison rae” and “360 featuring robyn and yung lean” (the latter of which is going against the highest streamed track on the original with 241 million).
Overall, the people of brat summer are enjoying adventurous reworks from unexpected artists as well as features from major pop stars.
Charli is a pop star, too, and after releasing music for over a decade, she is having her moment. Brat and it’s completely different but its also still brat showed exactly what she intends to do as her profile continues to grow: take creative risks.
Taking risks is the only way to make change. Giving her collaborators so much free reign on the remix album was a huge risk, but in doing so she didn’t just change her own songs. She changed what a remix album can be. And the beauty in that is right there on the cover of the album.
In an interview with Billboard, Charli made it clear her intention for the album cover was to be risky and controversial:
“There’s this idea of making something quite disgusting and turning it into this thing that you know people are going to look at quite a lot and think about and ask ‘Why that green? Why the pixelated font? Why is it so crap?’” Charli said. “I really enjoyed that some people absolutely hated it.”
That’s what brat summer was really about. Doing you even if other people might not understand it. They might think it’s crap. They might absolutely hate it. But that’s not a reason to avoid taking a risk. As long as everyone, whether they’re a musician or not, takes risks to be who they truly are, brat summer will go on forever.
Data and editing by Sarah Kloboves; cover image by Crasianne Tirado
