CHARLI XCX Vinilo y CD

Review: 'Brat' is Charlotte Emma Aitchison's sixth studio album as Charli XCX, the follow-up from her "sell-out era", 2022's 'Crash' which topped multiple charts and gave the British pop singer a newfound notoriety that she had long been deserving. A longtime collaborator with PC Music founder and Beyonce-credited producer A.G. Cook, whose production can be found in the album's latest double single 'Club Classics/B2b', Charli is returning to her roots of dance music and electronic pop - a far cry from the hazy alt-pop she launched her career with. Following the launch of 'Von dutch', the lead single produced by PC Music producer EASYFUN (aka Finn Keanne), Charli has gone on record saying that this is her best body of work - a title that once belonged to the cult classic mixtape 'Pop 2' - and it's easy to see why, the blaring synths and honed in club music focus is unlike anything anybody in the mainstream pop sphere is doing right now. Pressed on a translucent black vinyl, and coupled with one of the best album covers maybe of all time, it's never been a better time to be one of Charli's angels.

Review: Charli XCX's 'Pop 2', first released as a mixtape in 2017, marked the moment the singer departed from her conventional chart-pop sensibilities and began flirting with hyperpop. Her involvement in the genre was also arguably one of the first moments hyperpop formed a mirror image to Charli's movements, with collaborating artists like A.G. Cook, Tommy Cash, and Dorian Electra beginning to flirt with the regular old pop world. The result was a blurring of the lines between what was and wasn't 'it' (it didn't yet have the name), producing an interesting conundrum. Full of such chirpy, retrofuturistic, and ironically distorted bangers as 'Backseat', 'Porsche', and 'Delicious', Charli and fellow featurer's vocals (MO, Carly Rae Jepsen) are crisp enough to sound like digital knife-edges. This pink vinyl reissue is not one to miss.

Review: The fourth album from the English pop experimentalist was made over just six week in a "do-it-yourself" collaborative process with her fans. It is inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown and was executively produced by A. G. Cook and BJ Burton. Fans and critics alike fell immediately in love with the record which was also shortlisted for the 2020 Mercury Prize. Edgy experimental production and hooky pop songwriting have rarely collided as successfully as they do here, with plenty of hyper-energetic sounds and shimmering synths, bubblegum bass and mechanical motifs all making this as much an impromptu mixtape as a studio album. Truly, this is a work of its time.