It’s rare that an artist’s commercial breakthrough is also their most critically acclaimed. It’s even rarer for an artist to make such a breakthrough more than a decade into their career. But U.K. pop singer Charli XCX managed to do both with her sixth studio album, Brat, which captured the zeitgeist in 2024 and introduced hyperpop to soccer moms across the U.S. and elsewhere.
Charli first caught our ear all the way back in 2011, with her early lo-fi singles “Stay Away” and “Nuclear Seasons,” which mixed ’80s-coded synths, dark-sided lyrics, and pitch-shifted vocals. Those singles paved the way for the pop-perfect True Romance, the punk-edged Sucker, and a pair of mixtapes, Number 1 Angel and Pop 2, that pushed the singer toward the more experimental sound she would later hone on 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now and Brat.
As we approach the one-year anniversary of Brat Summer, we took a look back at Charli’s discography and ranked all six of her studio albums and both of her full-length mixtapes from worst to best. Sal Cinquemani
8. Number 1 Angel (2017)
Frustrated by the repeated delays of her third studio album, Charli released two mixtapes, recorded in secret, that deepened her exploration of the hyperpop sound she first touched on with 2016’s polarizing, Sophie-produced Vroom Vroom EP. The first of the two, Number 1 Angel, saw the singer collaborating for the first time with other members of the PC Music collective, and the result has had surprisingly long legs (A.G. Cook recently re-interpolated “Lipgloss” on 2024’s “Britpop,” and the melody of Selena Gomez’s Charli-penned “Bluest Flame” is clearly indebted to the elastic earworm “Roll with Me”). The mixtape’s tempered experimentalism and relentlessly catchy, if repetitive, hooks served both parties well: Charli’s pop instincts helped PC’s abrasive, alien sound become more polished and palatable, broadening their influence while giving Charli new credibility as a futurist. Nick Seip
7. Sucker (2014)
Charli’s sophomore effort, Sucker, is the sound of a long-incubating star emerging so fully formed on an international stage that it’s difficult to figure that an artist gifted with so much sneering bravado was ever thought of as an underdog. The album’s first half is presumably the result of the scrapped punk album that Charli reportedly recorded in Sweden, concentrated into take-no-prisoners genre-melding pop songs imbued with snot-nosed teenage insouciance, while the second half exposes a more vulnerable version of an artist who’s still unsure of her status in the pop world (“Famous”) and fumbling through her love life (“Need Ur Love”). Nobody’s going to be tricked into thinking Sucker, which is filled with compact songs that rarely stray from such tried-and-true pop fixations as parties and romance, is an important artistic document. But someone needed to author the aural equivalent of the body shot, and Charli XCX has provided the platonic ideal of just that. James Rainis
6. Crash (2022)
Crash extends the car metaphor of Charli XCX’s 2016 EP Vroom Vroom, kicking off with a bouncy, two-minute title track centered on the narrator’s full-fledged intention to wreck her vehicle. But while the album nods toward a propensity for self-sabotage, it sounds like Charli is more interested in reforming herself than reveling in chaos. This is mostly due to the album’s production choices, which are fleet-footed and less brash than those of 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now. David Bowie’s 1983 album Let’s Dance is a more fitting comparison point for Crash—an effective pivot to dance floor tropes from an artist known for being wholly original and daring but unapologetically content to swim in more conventional waters for a bit. Though the album jettisons some of the sonic adventurousness of Charli’s past releases, it still finds the singer workshopping the reckless abandon of her persona. Charles Lyons-Burt
5. Charli (2019)
Where her 2017 mixtapes Number 1 Angel and Pop 2 felt like works in progress, the sound on Charli XCX’s third album, Charli, feels more resolutely hers. Her ear for melody is rendered all the more sharp by primary producer A.G. Cook’s bold, refractive electronic soundscapes, and featured artists like Sky Ferreira and HAIM seem to be part of a more cohesive, shared vision than Charli’s past collaborations. That’s not to say that she has it all figured out. If there’s anything that binds Charli’s songs thematically, it’s the singer’s candidness about how much she still has to work through. The result is a collection of sad bops masquerading as bangers, just as perfect for the club as for a solo bedroom dance party. Anna Richmond
4. True Romance (2013)
Charli XCX’s biggest hit, Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” co-written by and featuring the singer herself, wasn’t included on her debut, True Romance. Which might explain in part why the album, despite being backed by a major label, barely made a blip on the mainstream radar. But the album is chockfull of potential pop smashes, with the crunchy, lo-fi electro-pop of early singles “Stay Away” and “Nuclear Seasons” complemented by the more radio-ready, just-left-of-center bubblegum pop of tracks like “Take My Hand” and the Gold Panda-sampling “You (Ha Ha Ha).” The result is a postmodern pastiche of ’80s-inspired synth melodies and standard Top 40 lyrical tropes juxtaposed with pitch-shifted vocals and growling, subterranean basslines from the end of the world. Cinquemani
3. Pop 2 (2017)
Throughout Pop 2, the second of two mixtapes she released in 2017, Charli XCX stretches pop music to its emotional and sonic extremes. Every feeling is larger than life and underscored by hyperpop production by A.G. Cook and the late Sophie. On “Tears,” the sadness of crumbling love is literalized with cinematic lyrics and guest Caroline Polachek’s unmistakable scream, while on “Delicious,” trance synths build like a drug- or desire-induced high, translating the neon-lit exhilaration of the club to the bedroom. The mixtape’s extensive guest list not only proves that Charli keeps her finger on the pulse of queer culture and emerging artists, but also illustrates just how wide the umbrella of “pop” is. But the moments of solitary introspection shine just as brilliantly: “Track 10” may be anonymously titled, but it’s one of Charli’s defining songs, a cannonball of catharsis and a radiant monument to the evolution of pop. Eric Mason
2. How I’m Feeling Now (2020)
Written and recorded in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic, How I’m Feeling Now was shaped by the limited tools the singer had access to at home. And Charli’s self-isolation imbues her fourth album, perhaps inevitably, with the confessional immediacy of bedroom-pop, even as the tracks reach for her signature brand of sonic maximalism. The result is a collection of songs that speaks to our current circumstances without being exclusively tethered to them. Heartbreak and despondency will always have a place in pop music, whether inflicted by a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic or the day-to-day vicissitudes of emotion. Though How I’m Feeling Now was born out of the former, it finds something interesting to say about the latter. Seth Wilson
1. Brat (2024)
Brat splits the difference between the stay-at-home hyperpop of 2020’s insular How I’m Feeling Now and the more radio-friendly dance-pop of 2022’s Crash, and the result is one of the most relentlessly infectious rave-ups since Katy B’s On a Mission. Like Brat’s production—furnished by frequent collaborator A.G. Cook, French knob-twirler Gessaffelstein, and George Daniel, among others—the lyrics are bold, bright, and in-your-face. But while the album is undeniably bratty and brash, it’s also frequently vulnerable. Charli’s carefully curated braggadociousness betrays a profound insecurity and need for, alternately and perhaps paradoxically, larger fame and a simpler life. The singer’s exploration of her priorities isn’t merely slapped atop catchy club beats though. What makes Brat the most compelling musical project of Charli’s career is the ways in which her ambivalence is in direct conversation with the music itself. Cinquemani
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