Note: brat is stylized several different ways: brat, Brat, and BRAT. For this review I will style it as brat, as that is consistently featured in the album art across iterations.
It’s hard to overstate the cultural impact of brat. brat was Instagram photoshoots and outfits. brat was tote bags and friendship bracelets. brat was birthday cakes. People carved brat pumpkins. brat meaningfully influenced a presidential election campaign. Someone remade the entirety of brat in Mario Paint Composer (though the fact that this showed up in my YouTube recommended might say more about me than the album).
And brat is literally more than just the album. brat is a color and a font. brat is interviews music videos. brat is one of the craziest album rollouts of all time. And brat is in fact 2 albums (3 if you’re being technical) - one of all the normal tracks, as released, and an entire new album with every song remixed with new collaborators and features (the 'third album' had the bonus tracks).
brat is the defining album of the 2020’s (so far, although it is hard to imagine that it will be surpassed). Released on July 7, brat's singles were cemented so atop the lists of “songs of the summer” that people instead deemed the entire season after the album: “brat summer” was the summer of 2024. The remix album, released on October 11, continued a "brat autumn".
But what’s more, this cultural domination has captured the essence of the 2020’s more so than anything else to date. The choices of the color and font on the album cover scream of the “awkward cozy” that has come to define Gen Z; it is unapologeticly itself, but feels right at home in this strange world we find ourselves in, the elongated Arial familiar but distinct. It's unclear if it could be replicated. Much of this cultural domination was, naturally, mediated largely though social media. Platforms are becoming more fractured. Presently at the time of writing TikTok is banned in the US, unavailable on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Attempting to mobilize across all the varied platforms seems increasingly difficult.
And in fact, TikTok was responsible for a large portion of its mass. Memes, dances, arts and crafts - it helped brat become something of a meme everywhere, all at once. brat was the epitome of what a meme is, what a meme can be.
As for the music I can only say that it’s very original. I think that it will have a massive influence on pop music production for years to come. It was able to be artistically exciting while also gaining mass appeal in a combination that is realitively rare. The status of the album in popular culture speaks for itself.
Personally, though, I will say that while only being a minor Charli xcx fan in years past I, according to my end-of-year-review, listened to enough brat to play the album from start to finish about 19 times over. It was my most listened to album of the year, and Charli xcx was my most listened to artist.
This could certainly influence my bias when assessing the merits of brat. But I really believe that it has done what no other album could do. It crazed a generation and push the art of music forward because it dared to be different. It dared to be brat.