In an age when remix packages often include little more than sped-up and slowed-down versions of songs tailor-made for TikTok, Charli XCX’s Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat takes a more holistic approach. The album serves as an extension of Charli’s project as an artist, and rather than commission a bunch of DJs to reinterpret the songs, they’re produced chiefly by Brat’s original creators.
In the wake of that album’s success, fame—with all of its pleasures and, mostly, pitfalls—forms an even more central thematic core here. Tracks like “Sympathy Is a Knife” take on stan culture, with guest Ariana Grande echoing subject matter that she explores on her own recent song “Yes, And?”—“It’s a knife when you’re so pretty they think it must be fake/It’s a knife when they dissect your body on the front page”—while “Von Dutch,” featuring Addison Rae, calls out the often toxic parasocial relationships fans have with the artists they claim to adore.
The trappings of celebrity, a topic that informs much of Brat, now permeates almost every single track. Feeling the pressure of her rising star, Charli reaches out to friend Caroline Polachek on “Everything Is Romantic,” which has been transformed from a song about finding beauty in a foreign land into one about losing oneself in a foreign land: “I’m trying to shut off my brain/I’m thinking about work all the time,” Charli laments from her hotel bed in Tokyo, to which Polachek replies, “It’s like you’re living the dream but end up not living your life.”
Similarly, “B2B” is revised to reflect the burden of “back-to-back” tour dates. Charli’s ambivalence about her belated success is apparent: “Oh, shit, I kinda made it,” she quips, as if she won a bet. If the original version of another track, “I Think About It All the Time,” found Charli struggling to balance her personal and professional lives, it takes on new weight here now that things are working out: “There’s so much guilt involved when we stop working/‘Cause you’re not supposed to stop when things start working.”
That track features Bon Iver, who serves as one half of a call-and-response, an effective structure—given how Brat has thrived in conversation with fans, influencers, and even political campaigns—that’s repeated throughout the album. Every song features at least one guest, who’s given the space to shine (though Robyn is largely wasted on the cluttered opening track, “360,” which also features Swedish rapper Yung Lean).
At nearly five minutes, “So I,” a tribute to Sophie, is the longest track on the album, with A.G. Cook taking to heart the late hyperpop producer’s perennial suggestion to “make it faster,” as immortalized in the lyrics of the original song. Elsewhere, the acid-washed “Club Classics” and techno-fied “365”—featuring blistering verses from BB Trickz and Shygirl, respectively—are given even more coked-out treatments, if that’s possible.
The fact that the album succeeds at creating something, well, completely different makes its adherence to the original track sequence feel enervating at times. The minimalist “I Might Say Something Stupid,” for one, was already jarringly sandwiched between the stuttering “Sympathy Is a Knife” and the house-y “Talk Talk” on Brat, and the remix, which is even more gently ruminative than the original, would feel all the more poignant had it been paired with, say, “Everything Is Romantic” or “So I” near the end of the tracklist.
Of course, a “tracklist” is but a mere suggestion in our world of über-curated playlisting. Song sequencing is as fluid as modern remixes themselves—interactive interpretations that represent the customization of “content” in the 21st century. Fully embracing these modes of music consumption, Charli delivers a self-reflexive reaction to her success with a companion piece that’s just as relevant—and just as reflective of the zeitgeist—as its parent album.
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