‘Allergic To Love’: the Charli XCX cover that pre-dated egg punk
The internet has always been crucial to Charli XCX’s artistry. After finding her start on MySpace as a teen, she eventually found her sonic home in hyperpop. It’s a genre that’s intrinsically online – in its auto-tuned, glitchy sound, in its cyber aesthetic, and in the communities that surround it.
With the release of the ongoing cultural phenomenon that is Brat, Charli has further proven her prowess over the internet and over hyperpop. She roped in fellow internet it girls Addison Rae and Julia Fox for remixes and music videos, sent social media into a frenzy as they discussed the potential subject of ‘Girl, so confusing’ (it’s Lorde), and even managed to cause a cultural stir with a minimalistic, bright green album cover.
But before she became the queen of clubbing, Charli briefly dabbled in a very different internet-core genre. If you scroll back far enough on her SoundCloud account, beyond the Brat era, through the various remixes of ‘1999’ and ‘Boys’, back to the days when her artwork looked as if it had been run through several Instagram filters, you’ll stumble across a cover of Snuffed by the Yakuza’s ‘Allergic to Love’.
The original track is a piece of gravelly garage rock, with twangy guitars and gasped vocal delivery, but a young Charli turned it into something else entirely. In a song that will sound alien to fans of her work in the hyperpop realm, she places impossibly scuzzy guitars and playful, screechy vocals under endearingly lo-fi production in something resembling egg punk.
“Maybe I should just sue you,” she squeals, “‘cause you got me a rash over my heart.” The beat just beneath her words is impossibly quick, daring you to try and tap your toes in time. Her vocals quickly devolve into exaggerated laughs and sneeze as she feigns being allergic to love before cutting off just after the track surpasses a minute runtime.
It’s a glimpse at a pre-pop Charli, at her potential to be a thriving DIY punk artist in another life, but it’s also a glimpse at a genre that hadn’t even been termed yet. A couple of years later, a meme presenting all punk as sitting somewhere between “chain” and “egg” would emerge, the former denoting harsher entries into the genre and the latter describing more playful attempts at punk.
Since then, a number of bands have come to define the frantic, almost cartoonish sound of egg punk. There’s Prison Affair in Barcelona, whose visuals embody the silliness of the genre with a recurring penis-nosed monster. There’s Snõõper in Tennessee, who bring puppets with them to their live shows. Then there’s The Coneheads in Indiana, whose commitment to wackiness has produced songs like ‘I Used To Be a Cheespuff’, and, somehow, this Charli XCX cover would fit right in on a playlist alongside all of them.
The rapid ridiculousness of her cover of ‘Allergic To Love’ embodied the ethos of egg punk before it even really came into existence. Perhaps there’s an alternative universe where, instead of pushing pop to its limits and calling for a brat summer, Charli delved further into the world of playful punk. A universe where she plays dingy DIY venues rather than boiler rooms and arenas, a universe where she swaps processed pop production for shabby four-track recordings designed to sound like demos.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Punk Newsletter
All the latest Punk content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.