Charli XCX
Charli
Release Date: Sep 13, 2019
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Atlantic
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Album Review: Charli by Charli XCX
Great, Based on 13 Critics
Based on rating 9
Charlotte Aitchison has come a long way from Iggy Azalea's 'Fancy'. It's hard to believe it's been five years since that song was everywhere - and equally as much time since Charli XCX has released a full studio album. While she's kept us quite a bit satiated in between with two different mixtapes and her 'Vroom Vroom' EP, the much-anticipated release of Charli finally looms ahead.
Based on rating 4/5
If, like me, your faith in Charli itself wavered, you are forgiven and I hope relieved. Maybe because of the delays, I let anxiety put the anti in my anticipation, where my faulty precognition decided that Charli would be the lower non-harmony to Pop 2 and Number 1 Angel. Because it’s a proper finale to that mixtape trilogy, maybe you were afraid it wouldn’t be her vision, the way True Romance seemed only to get some of Earthquakes and Heartbreaks and Super Ultra.
Based on rating 8/10
It's taken Charli XCX five years to follow up her last proper studio album, 2014's Sucker. But the Charli that made that album is not the Charli found on Charli. In the intervening years, across a handful of singles, EPs and mixtapes, Charli XCX, born Charlotte Aitchison, radically rearranged her approach to music. Where she was previously known as a dependable writer, guest artist and hit-maker in her own right, she's now taking on a new role: that of convenor. Charli boasts 14 different collaborators across 15 tracks. On the ….
Based on rating 4/5
The result of years of experimentation, this album enlists established stars and emerging talents to create a work that is quintessentially Charli XCX This album has long been a tantalising prospect. Since her previous LP, 2014’s punk-inflected ‘Sucker’, Charli XCX has taken a turn for the avant-pop, releasing a string of experimental EPs and mixtapes that saw her fuse pop with woozy electronics and future-facing, crunchy production. In 2016, she released 'Vroom Vroom', the chaotic four-track EP produced by PC Music-affiliated producer SOPHIE, which blended noisy synths with kinetic beats - and saw Charli totally reinvent herself.
Based on rating 7.8/10
Long before she had firsthand experience with pop music's star-making assembly line, songwriting camps, and royalty splits, 14-year-old Charli XCX thought that people made music because they were brainwashed by robots. "Who writes the songs/The machines do," she sings with bug-eyed terror on her unreleased 2008 debut, 14. The lyrics are a little ridiculous, but Charli wasn't exactly wrong in the assumption that there are complex mechanisms lurking behind most chart-topping songs.
Based on rating 7/10
During the five years between Sucker and her self-titled official third album, Charli XCX was busier than ever exploring the different sides of her music. Not only did she found her own label, Vroom Vroom, she wrote songs for and collaborated with a who's who of pop music. She also released two mixtapes, Number 1 Angel and Pop 2, that reflected her mercurial talent -- and her connections to pop's underground and mainstream -- better than either True Romance or Sucker did.
Based on rating 3.5/5
Charli XCX might just be the world's unluckiest pop star. Signed while still a teenager, eventual debut full-length 'True Romance' was a hipster's wet dream of credits; star alt-pop knob-twiddlers Ariel Rechtshaid and Justin Raisen sitting alongside Gold Panda, J£zus Million and BloodPop. A critical darling, it didn't, however, click with the public.
Based on rating 7/10
No one would dare to call the music of Charlotte Aitchison minimalist. The artist better known as Charli XCX has spent the better part of the past decade gradually shifting the pop landscape, from adding to the radio canon ("I Love It," "Boom Clap," "Fancy"), to hyping up artists from around the globe (Tommy Cash, PC Music, Kim Petras, etc.). 2017's mixtape Pop 2, Charli's opus, was a 10 track blend of experimental pop maximalism that played like a DJ-Kicks dance mix for the end of the world.
Based on rating 3.5
Ever since Charli XCX dived into the sickly sweet, avant-garde world of PC Music - releasing an EP produced by SOPHIE, making A. G. Cook her 'creative director' - it was clear that her label were less than thrilled with this turn of events. While mixtape after mixtape was released to critical acclaim, there remained a growing sense that Asylum were waiting for her to get over a phase.
Based on rating 7/10
Her 2017 mixtapes Number 1 Angel and Pop 2 were world-building exercises for an imagined future where accelerated technology is a matter of fact; where time is flattened and all eras of pop (re)play out at once. Charli - her fourth album proper - is her first big statement from this established world. Charli's imagined future is convincing because it's not acknowledged lyrically - pop concerns of romance, heartbreak and partying are eternal, and maybe even more essential as an emotional crutch as the apocalypse gets closer.
Opinion: Excellent
The Lowdown: Charli XCX is pop music's brilliant middle child, caught between her stadium-ready elders and the intimate YouTubers cropping up behind her. The singer-songwriter, born Charlotte Aitchison, surprisingly got her start on Myspace and, after penning hits for Icona Pop and Iggy Azalea, struck out on her own. (Buy: Tickets to Upcoming Charli XCX Shows) Even though her 2013 debut album, True Romance, was slightly underwhelming, her 2014 follow-up, Sucker, more than made up for it.
Opinion: Excellent
B ritish pop auteur Charlotte Aitchison has been based in the belly of the beast - the US - for some years now, trying to disrupt the global mainstream with her own mischievous futurist agenda. For every chart success, she acknowledges, there has been a tussle behind the scenes over her direction and levels of compromise. Charli, her third official album, finally hits a noisy, sweet spot.
Opinion: Excellent
I n the five years since Charli XCX released her last album, she's sworn that industry interference meant she would never make another. But here we are: after an overwhelmingly productive half-decade of unofficial releases and collaborations, Charli is an album proper, a diminishingly important semantic distinction but one that puts the 27-year-old firmly at its heart. Her last mixtape, 2017's Pop 2, centred outsider guests in 10 diamond-hard would-be hits, laced with hard-partying nihilism and numbed with a measure of Auto-Tune that made Cher's Believe sound like Etta James singing At Last.
'Charli'
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