The one song Charli XCX will always regret: “I fucked myself”
Compared to the vast majority of pop acts currently working today, Charli XCX has gone through an artistic evolution that very few others can claim to have experienced, and her insistence on moving in a certain direction ultimately paid off with the staggering success of 2024’s Brat. It’s an album that perfectly captured the zeitgeist and will most likely help to inform the direction of pop music for the next decade.
What caused her to move in this direction was her exposure to and fascination with PC Music, an underground record label formed by producer and songwriter AG Cook in 2013. Releasing music that was dubbed as hyperpop, with a distinct focus on futuristic electronic production, sassy sprechgesang vocals and cutesy yet complex bubblegum melodies, the label was responsible for helping launch the careers of Hannah Diamond, Danny L Harle and by association, Sophie.
Charli developed an interest in the work of Cook and his associates early in the label’s existence, and even began to work with him in 2017, with him producing and co-writing many of the songs on her mixtape, Number 1 Angel. Where before she was simply releasing radio-friendly and perfectly serviceable pop songs, it was when she began to immerse herself in this scene that her career caught a completely different trajectory, and her output became significantly more experimental in nature.
While that may have meant a slight initial decline in popularity, her insistence that this would be the future direction of all pop music proved to be correct, with the mainstream eventually cottoning on to the idea that hyperpop was indeed on course to become a cultural mainstay. Her rise to the top has seen her further popularise the genre and influence many other acts in the process. However, while some of her earlier work may be more accessible, she’s torn on its artistic merits.
In a 2022 interview with Vulture, she was hyper-critical of her 2014 hit, ‘Break the Rules’, a song that she has claimed to regret releasing on multiple occasions. Evidently, disappointed with its artistic direction, she slated the track for how it drew her further away from the music she wanted to be making and was especially disappointed with how her record label insisted that it would be a hit despite her disdain for the final product.
While she claimed that she “never loved” the song, she did say that it’s still worth having as part of her repertoire for one reason. “I would never play it at my own show,” she claimed, “It’s like a little party trick that I bring out. When I was opening for Taylor [Swift], a lot of people who were at the show and were completely confused by a song like ‘Vroom Vroom’ would actually get the same kind of experience from ‘Break the Rules’ in that they would be able to identify me as ‘a girl with attitude’.”
While she’d made a lot of artistic leaps by 2022, she was still harsh towards the track much earlier on. In a 2017 interview with Q magazine, she explained how she came up with the song at a writing camp alongside other pop acts, and proclaimed that “Whoever sings this song is an idiot,” before realising, “Cut to four months later, it’s on my album, and it’s my new single. I fucked myself”.
She may have thought she’d ruined her career by releasing this lacklustre song from Sucker, but it’s clear that in the years since, she’s done more than enough to redeem herself.
