Why Brat Hit and The Tortured Poets Department Flopped

Guthrie Meyer ‘25

I never listened to Charli XCX before Brat, but when I heard that she was making a club-inspired-pop album, I looked forward to what she would create. Unfortunately, it turns out that Brat sounds much less intense, heavy, and noisy than the music I perceive as club music.None of this is to say that the album doesn’t have gritty or dark moments, but while listening to Brat, I often found myself anticipating a drop that never came, or thinking “wait, that was the chorus?” Still, throughout the buildup to the release of the album and the album’s subsequent successful run over the summer, I enjoyed the cultural shift Brat created in the world of pop music. The anticipation for a summer-defining trend combined with the vacuum left in pop music by Taylor Swift’s failure to hold on to audiences with The Tortured Poets Department, set up Brat for incredible success.

2019’s “Hot Girl Summer” and 2023’s “Barbie Summer” both celebrated women for being independent, feminist, and, of course, hot. Women elevated to the cultural pedestal by these movements seemed untouchable, but the consumers of these trends began to want something more. While Brat also promotes the aesthetics of hot girls enjoying themselves and the latest trends, Charli XCX’s new album delivers vulnerability that previous cultural movements did not. Brat celebrates women in both the public sphere—where the facade of beauty, fashion, and personality create celebrities—and the private sphere, where insecurities or emotional knots can be untied. Though the album includes songs which would fit in with previous waves of pop (“Mean girls”), Charli shares songs about being socially anxious (“I might say something stupid”) and conversations about womanhood (“Girl, so confusing”). Yet “Mean girls” praises imperfection too and emphasizes that someone is still hot, even in “last night’s makeup.” Journalist Meaghan Garvey, speaking in conversation with Shaad D’Souza and Lindsay Zoladz on The New York Times Popcast, describes Brat as “this persona where you’re a hot girl, you’re feeling yourself, all of this, and then having these deep insecurities that you feel like you can't share anywhere else except the group chat.” Brat broke the cycle by reminding fans that you can be a hot girl and still be a real person. So, why did the vulnerability of Brat help the album define the summer in a way that Taylor Swift’s new album—despite all of its vulnerable songs about heartbreak and melodrama—could not?

Critics of The Tortured Poets Department point out the weak facade Swift attempts to build for the listener. Swift performs insecurities and vulnerabilities like she’s not one of the most popular, profitable, and powerful music artists ever. Outside of the musical sphere, she even works to uphold the illusion of a relationship with her fans through social media, with Tweets like “get in the car, it’s august” or describing her new, exclusive release as “...on its way to you.” TTPD received moderate reviews, with many critics arguing that Swift had given up the artistry that early albums Red, 1989, and Speak Now had—creativity that lifted her into her current stardom. In an article on Taylor Swift’s chart numbers compared to the cultural impact of Brat, Shaad D’Souza, from Pitchfork, writes that, “for Swift, it seems that creative success is no longer as satisfying as selling the most records and spending the most weeks at No 1.” On a New York Times podcast, D’Souza also describes the aftermath of the album as, “this environment where people are desperate for someone to show their insecurities in a genuine way and show their kind of flaws.” That environment created a vacuum that Brat filled perfectly. The energy of Brat combined with honest, self-aware vulnerabilities create the persona of Brat, which D’Souza describes as “‘yeah, I’m a f*cking pop star and I feel like shit all the time.” 

Brat went on to define the summer of 2024. With multiple extra releases for her raving fans, especially the song “Guess” in collaboration with Billie Eilish, Charli XCX not only reached new heights of popularity, she also blazed a new movement in denial of the fabricated personas of other popstars.