We sure hope so.
Brat. Over the summer, the phenomenon of an album seemed to take over everyone’s brain. The album, debuting at No.1 on Billboard’s Top Dance/Electronic Albums Chart, was everywhere by June. The distinct neon green color of the album could be seen on shirts, murals in San Francisco (briefly), and even was a large part of Kamala Harris’s campaign over the summer, with shirts sporting the tweet Charli XCX herself wrote, “ Kamala IS brat”. Even the font of the album was used in many brands’ marketing, and was (and is) a large meme format.
But how did this album even begin to rise in popularity? To find this out, we have to look back to 2023, when the theme of the summer was the Barbie movie, and it was a time for mainly girls everywhere to dress up in their favorite pink outfits and rejoice at the movie theater to enjoy an incredibly powerful, heartwarming movie about what being a woman really means. Charli XCX had a song in the Barbie movie, “Speed Drive”. The song had multiple elements of the “brat” album, and brought her an even wider audience than before. Super fans of Charli XCX also noticed that the music video for the song “Speed Drive” contained multiple hidden easter eggs, future hints and words that breadcrumbed more and more interest in the “brat” album. In the video, XCX even had the word “brat” scrawled in hot pink underneath her iconic black boots.Â
Much later, in February, “Von Dutch” was released by the artist as a single, and while at first it didn’t garner as much attention as it should’ve, Charli then collaborated with an unexpected artist, Addison Rae, to make the “Von Dutch” remix in March. The song led to a combination of chronically online fans tweeting and Tiktoking about the successful collab, and new fans interested in her newer music. This was the push that was needed to bring brat into existence. With fans of the song primed and excited for more, Charli began to release one single per month for two months followed by two remixes of each song, with “Club Classics” coming out in April, and “360” coming out in May. Then brat was brought into the world in June.
Not only did “brat” have extreme lasting power as an album, but it was also the new versions of songs, new collaborations with artists and an entirely new version of the album that kept giving it a new feel. The other album “brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not”, just kept defining the original album further, and gave fans more to talk about, (even the song “Talktalk”). But here’s the most genius part of it all: The tour had barely even started.
The brat tour, beginning June 1st, and ending December 2nd, will almost guarantee the lasting popularity of brat, at least until January 2025. With fans already watching countless videos of the tour, and watching many surprise artists they love being brought out on the tour, each new concert is a delight, and they don’t even have to be there for it. Many are ecstatically excited for what one could call “bratumn” or a “brat fall”. There could even be a “brinter” ahead. So until whatever next summer brings, it seems this brat summer is here to stay.Â