‘In the City’: the lowest point of Charli XCX’s discography to date
Sometimes, the worst thing a song can be is boring. Just four months before Charli XCX would enter the defining era of her career, she released a single that has already been largely forgotten. At this time, Charli had just wrapped up touring the Crash album, a record that she and her fans treated as a Schrödinger’s cat of sorts. Her vision for the record was to make a stereotypical major label pop venture, as it would mark the end of her contract with Asylum Records. However, whether that was in an effort to generate sales or to make some sort of semi-ironic artistic statement is where the line blurs.
There are a handful of excellent tracks on Crash, especially those that pay homage to retro pop trends. The Y2K panache of ‘Yuck’, the disco-infused ‘Baby’, and the bouncy, bubblegum sweetness of ‘Twice’ all prove that Charli is, first and foremost, a student of pop music. But if her goal was to get on H&M’s companywide playlist, she got her wish (I worked at a department store during this album cycle and tracks two to five were all on the store playlist).
Songs like ‘Beg For You’ and ‘New Shapes’ are just completely devoid of anything that made Charli XCX a compelling artist in the first place—they’re derivative and generic. However, this rut in her creativity hit a fever pitch with the 2023 single ‘In the City’, which features fellow British pop star Sam Smith.
Both had their big breaks in 2014: Charli with ‘Boom Clap’ and Smith with ‘Stay with Me’. Time will tell how well these songs and that entire era of pop music age, but both continued their careers with middling success in the years following. Charli XCX found herself with a cult, internet-based core audience that praised her avant-garde and innovative pop stylings, and Smith was able to reliably score a charting song or two for each album cycle (most recently the Grammy-winning ‘Unholy’ with Kim Petras). While not particularly closely associated otherwise, there were certainly more unlikely pairings for a song.
‘In the City’ is fine. It’s a perfectly serviceable club song, and the chemistry between Charli and Smith isn’t egregious, but certainly nothing to write home about. There’s not much to dig through or say about the track which, for an artist as interesting and eclectic as Charli XCX, is worse than a song that is in-your-face awful. If anything, this track does a great job of highlighting what makes Brat (or even a record like Pop 2 or How I’m Feeling Now) so excellent.
Every piece on Brat is as much of a club song as ‘In the City’, but what makes the tracks from the former shine are their subtle vulnerabilities. In the context of the record, a braggadocio track like ‘Von Dutch’ is told from the perspective of someone doing their best to push down their insecurities, as it’s sequenced after two songs about feeling out of place and upset at a party (‘Sympathy Is a Knife’/’I Might Say Something Stupid’) and being scared to talk to your crush (‘Talk Talk’), respectively.
The only thing communicated through the entirety of ‘In the City’ is that Charli has found other cool people that she connects with while out clubbing. It is a fine sentiment but lacks the nuance that Charli was capable of prior and proved to be just as capable thereafter. Through a vast and accomplished career full of damningly belated appreciation, this track remains an anomaly in the Charli XCX catalogue.
