Charli XCX opened up about her feelings on fame and the making of her upcoming album, Brat, in a new cover story for British GQ.
“I’m constantly going back and forth in my conflict around fame and what constitutes success,” Charli told the outlet in an interview published Friday. “This new music is not going to be played in Starbucks. It’s not going to be played on the Zen Morning playlist. It’s pop music and I’m being true to myself. But I also know that if I chose a slightly different, maybe more palatable path, I do have the skills as a songwriter to write big Top 40 pop hits.”
Charli also said she crafted the songs on Brat to be high-low art pop, which she describes as stripped down with sticky pop hooks.
“We’re in this place where people thought pop music needed to be big and full of poetic metaphors to give it some kind of authenticity, which I don’t think is true at all,” Charli said.
So what constitutes the authenticity she's striving for?
“I wanted to create this world of that 2000s flip phone, cameras flashing, live fast, die young. I wanted my lyrics to be conversational because that’s what I think pop culture actually is: it’s a 15-second TikTok, a selfie in a cloud, a text to your friends being like ‘Where you at, b****?’” Charli said.
Brat, Charli's sixth studio album, releases on June 7.