Hello!
We’re halfway through the year and summer is in full swing. The (online) cultural moment seems to be BRAT summer this year (more on that later), although I must say that I do slightly miss the sheer ecstasy of last year’s Barbie summer.
This month I had my first ice cream from an ice cream shop of the year and it was a scoop of pistachio ice cream (in a cone). Pistachio is having its culinary-trend-of-the-season moment this year, but let it be noted here that I’ve been a pistachio fan since way before that!
Another minor lifestyle update is that I bought one of those 5-year-journals. I thought it might be a nice little project to try and fill it out by my 30th (!?!??!) birthday. I’ve not been filling it out every single day or as consistently as I’d like to to be completely honest, but as of writing this, I have written at least one sentence for each day, which I see as a win!
Charli xcx – BRAT
I didn’t listen to Charli xcx’s ‘BRAT’ on release day because I simply just wasn’t in the right mood to listen to a party album. But since listening to it in full (about a week or so later), I’ve been fully on board. What an album she’s made, and what an immaculate tracklist it has! It is completely singular in its vision and I think Charli and her team have truly and fully brought it to life, not only with the record itself, but through whole album world they’ve created. (I’m thinking of writing something a bit longer about the visuals and the marketing surrounding it because it’s been just so fun and exciting to follow it and I think it was/is brilliant.)
The lyrics on ‘BRAT’ are so simple, yet she tells us everything she needs and wants to. They’re like diary entries, at moments I thought that maybe they’re too simple, maybe they’re not crafted enough, but then I thought to myself: why should they be? would wrapping them in mystery or metaphor mean that they are in any way better? That she is expressing some deeper thought or truth? And then I answered to myself that no, it wouldn’t. Charli offers us a look into her life and her thoughts in the form of pop hits and we are to accept them as they are. She rises above the relatable celebrity, she doesn’t have to try to convince us that she’s just like us, she doesn’t have to craft a convincing relatable persona. She put out her most honest album and there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that every word she’s singing about her life is true.
The girl, so confusing remix with lorde (deserves its own section)
I’ve heard the singles before the album release and I watched the Boiler Room set (which is excellent, by the way), but what got me fully on board to listen carefully and attentively was ‘The girl, so confusing version with lorde’. Now, it’s no secret that I am a huge Lorde fan and admirer, and have been ever since basically when Pure Heroine released (I hold this album very close to my heart, having listened to it when I must have been around 14 or so, and then I kept reconnecting with it every couple years). And Lorde is not a very public-facing artists. She does her thing, appears online every now and then with an update, and then goes back to quietly doing her thing until she releases an album that is perfectly in line with her listeners’ life stage and helps us all to get through it. So when the news that she’s releasing something, anything, arrived, I was very much looking forward to it.
There has been some talk and speculation online that ‘Girl, so confusing’ is about Lorde, or maybe Marina (formerly Marina & the Diamonds), some even calling it a diss track. Charlie opens the track with “Yeah, I don’t know if you like me / Sometimes I think you might hate me / Sometimes I think I might hate you / Maybe you just wanna be me”. She sings about how confused she is by the other person and her intentions and her thoughts about her. She thinks they don’t have anything in common, so why are they trying to make it work? She’s not accusing the other girl of any wrongdoing, she’s just confused about the relationship, her insecurities seep through again, and she wants to understand where they stand.
But then they, in Lorde’s words, work it out on the remix. Lorde delivers a brutal and devastatingly honest verse, squashing the speculation that there is any bad blood between the two of them. She reveals her own struggles that led to her misconstrued behaviour. Line after line, she tells us she’s been struggling with her mental health, and possibly an eating disorder, was feeling deeply insecure, didn’t want to be seen and it didn’t even occur to her that Charli was (over)thinking about their interactions. “It’s you and me on the coin / The industry loves to spend / And when we put this to bed / The internet will go crazy / I’m glad I know how you feel / ‘Cause I ride for you, Charli” she concludes on her part of the song.
Finally, I could not publish this without writing about ‘So I’, Charli’s ode to the late SOPHIE. She sings about her in Club classics too, when she declares “I wanna dance to me / I wanna dance to A.G. / I wanna dance with George / I wanna dance to SOPHIE”. ‘So I’ is the most somber, bittersweet song on the album, where Charli reflects on her friendship with SOPHIE and the grief that came with her passing. She was her frequent collaborator, by many regarded as one of the greatest music geniuses of the generation, and undoubtedly gone too soon. Charli wonders what she could have done differently in her friendship, regretting all the time she was distant and gives a nod her song It’s okay to cry. Unsurprisingly, SOPHIE’s influence can be heard all throughout BRAT (and Charli’s other albums too). I am yet to not tear up (or, at the very least choke up) when listening to this song. If not sooner, then always by the time the “Got a phone call after Christmas / Didn’t know how I should act / I watched you dance online” part comes on (SOPHIE died unexpectedly in January 2023 after an accidental fall while trying to take a picture of the moon). She is so deeply loved and missed by many, and her legacy lives on, like Charlie sang: “Your sounds, your words live on endless”. I will probably write more about her when the posthumous album comes out in September.
To quickly wrap this up, Charli xcx has crafted an outstanding pop album which is a perfect and logical continuation of her previous work. It is many people’s current contender for album of the year, myself included.
When I wasn’t listening to ‘BRAT’ this month, I still mostly listened to ‘Wisecrack’ by Haley Blais (which I already wrote about last month), and also ‘Box for Buddy, Box for Star’ by This is Lorelei. This is Lorelei is Nate Amos’s solo project (his other band is Water From Your Eyes, who have been on my radar, and I’m vaguely familiar with, but have not gotten really into for some reason). A quick scroll through his artist page on Bandcamp, or any other streaming platform, will reveal a few dozen releases, which is always a bit daunting to look at when you just found out about a new artist, and also the reason why I haven’t listened to any of them (yet). But I have listened to his latest full-length, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, which is just such a good time. Standout tracks are ‘I’m All Fucked Up’ and ‘Dancing in the Club’.
I also finished reading ‘Good Material’ by Dolly Alderton, which I enjoyed and it was quite a light read. A book I can only describe as a “summer beach read.” It’s about a guy in his mid-30s dealing with a breakup. He’s a stand-up comedian, and he’s quite an immature person, but some of the debacles he gets himself into were so silly that I just had to laugh. The novel is written from (mostly) from his perspective, so we have to kind of live in his head for the time being, which can be a little frustrating, but also just so “wtf are you even thinking dude.” A fun read overall.
And that concludes my June recap. A whole month late, but hey, at least it’s here. Thank you for reading!
Until next time (which will hopefully be way sooner),
Mia