For much of the last decade, being a fan of Charli XCX has involved a fair amount of pining for greater commercial notoriety.
The punk-pop aesthetic of Sucker, her sophomore album, failed to set the world on fire, seemingly dissolving the singer-songwriter's interest in an aggressively mainstream gesture.
Brat struck a sly balance between the approaches. It stuck out in the modern pop landscape because it didn't scan as a self-conscious act of trying to rope the most people it could into listening.
In a year of pop stars copying each other's homework and avoiding uncomfortable conversations, "Sympathy is a knife" and "Girl, so confusing" said "Fuck you, I'm a real person with genuine and often uncomfortably perplexing feelings."
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