On 7 June 2024, Charli XCX released Brat, a hyper-pop record that within weeks had transcended music to become the defining aesthetic of the season. The album, with its unapologetic neon-green cover and its club-forward sound, coined the phrase brat summer, an attitude adopted by everyone from fans to presidential campaigns.
The album’s songs, including the duet Apple, the anthem Von Dutch and the summer hit featuring Billie Eilish, dealt with self-doubt, insecurity and hedonism, and its candid, wounded lyrics stood in contrast to its icy production. Its marketing was genius: the brat green, the fragmented self-awareness, the deliberate courting of internet culture.
The phenomenon reached its apex when Kamala Harris’s campaign embraced brat summer as its unofficial aesthetic after she entered the presidential race, an endorsement of Charli’s cultural reach. Brat, an album made on the fringes of the pop mainstream by an artist who had spent two decades there, became the soundtrack of the summer, a reminder that the internet could still turn an outsider into the centre of the culture.