It’s hard to imagine how anyone could follow up the success and cultural dominance of Charli xcx‘s Brat. But in a new interview, the British pop star said that she’s sidestepping that concern altogether.
Speaking to Culted at the Cannes International Film Festival, Charli opened up about the “pressure” to top her critically acclaimed sixth studio album in a piece published Tuesday (May 20). “I don’t really feel the pressure to create another record like Brat, because when I was making it, even though I really believed in it and totally knew what I wanted to do with it, I had no idea how it would be received,” she began.
“I was really doing it for myself and marketing it in the way I wanted to for myself, but I had no clue that people would kind of connect to it in the way that they did,” she continued. “So yeah, I don’t really feel the pressure, because I feel that you can never really do the same thing twice, and my next record will probably be a flop which I’m down for to be honest.”
Released in June 2024, Brat reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200 — Charli’s highest career peak on the chart to date. From its meme-fueling lime-green cover to its moment at the center of the 2024 United States presidential race, the album made the “Apple” singer a bona fide pop A-lister after spending years as a smaller cult-favorite artist.
Now, Charli has been focused on touring the album — she wrapped four sold-out nights at Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., earlier in May — and onscreen opportunities, including a movie she conceptualized for A24 called The Moment. Almost a year after Brat‘s release, she’s also been enjoying a resurgence of one of her older songs: “Party 4 U,” which has taken off on TikTok five years after it was released on 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now.
“It takes me back to the time of the pandemic, really, because that’s when I was recording the vocals,” she told Culted of the track, for which she recently dropped a music video. “It actually started a while before that — the initial idea. But we kind of never — I never really took it anywhere. So, yeah, now when I think of the song, I just think back to five years ago and how different the world was then. We were all inside. No one was hanging out. You know, it was kind of lonely.”
