okebet Charli XCX’s Year of the ‘Brat’

This year, the name of the brash, formerly underground pop star Charli XCX and her album “Brat” showed up a lot of places I never in my wildest dreams expected: the floor of the Democratic National Convention; Fox News and CNN (“I will aspire to be brat,” the anchor Jake Tapper vowed to a perplexed nation on July 22); the marquee outside a sold-out Madison Square Garden; Barack Obama’s summer playlist; the M.T.A.’s social media profile; a text thread with my mother; those colored note cards that announce “Saturday Night Live” hosts; the top of Metacritic’s list of the best-reviewed albums of 2024; and the headlines announcing the 2025 Grammys’ most nominated artists.

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Since the June 7 release of her sixth studio album, 32-year-old Charli’s joyride to the center of popular culture has accelerated at an astounding velocity. Before this summer she was — as she put it on “I Might Say Something Stupid,” an understated, Auto-Tuned “Brat” confessional — “famous but not quite,” as in “perfect for the background, one foot in a normal life.” By the time Charli’s star-studded, expertly curated “Brat” remix album dropped on Oct. 11, she had some status updates, delivered with a signature plain-spoken shrug. “Oh [expletive],” she sang on a new version of the clubby “B2b.” “I kinda made it.”

Throughout the year, as Charli continued to release candid music about fame that only made her exponentially more famous, she seemed to approach stardom as a Warholian art project, the likes of which the pop world had not seen since early Lady Gaga. “You can play games with it,” she said of stardom (in another unexpected place, “The Howard Stern Show”), “and I think that’s a very interesting part of being an artist as well, when you can use that thing — fame, publicity — as a tool.”

ImageFans gathered at a listening party for Charli XCX’s “Brat” remix album in October.Credit...Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times

The triumphant end point was a remix LP with a title poking fun at money-grabbing deluxe albums: “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.” The track list reads like a humblebrag about how many people want their names associated with Charli XCX in 2024: Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Julian Casablancas, Bon Iver. It is full of winking in-jokes, too, like sampling a bilingual voice note from the perpetually vacationing Dua Lipa on a Balearic house remix of “Talk Talk,” or assigning her friend the 1975 frontman Matty Healy a song called “I Might Say Something Stupid.” (Might?)

Things were completely different all right — but were they still brat? At the beginning of the summer, embracing the album and its accompanying aesthetic had the cachet of knowing some whispered password that granted entry into an exclusive, prohibitively cool club. But as Charli moved from pop culture’s side stages to its headlining gigs, some inconvenient questions began to linger. Like, what happens to a club when it’s way over capacity? At what point does the fire marshal arrive to commit the ultimate party foul?

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Speaking in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where Vice President Kamala Harris has a slight edge in recent polls, Mr. Trump bristled at the notion that his struggles with women voters could cost him the election and suggested that his tough talk about immigration and economic proposals would resonate with them.

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