In 2010, when she was “Charli XCX” only on flyers for underground London raves, Charlotte Aitchison sang Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” as a performance art piece while studying at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art. It’s hard not to view the school project as a prophecy. Britney’s impact is woven throughout Charli’s career, culminating in a scrapped songwriting collaboration and a classically Britney Instagram diss: “They keep saying I’m turning to random people to do a new album … I will never return to the music industry !!!”

Fourteen years after university, Charli is, in some circles, as mononymous as her art school muse. Her mainstream-pop-held-at-gunpoint album, 2022’s Crash, was her first to reach the Billboard top 10, but her core fanbase, and even Charli herself, felt disappointed by the record’s paint-by-numbers hits. Brat, Charli XCX’s sixth official album, is about retreating to her niche and partying with the club kids who first launched her career. But it’s also about the disillusionment of fame, the realization that success won’t eradicate envy or erase the societal pressure to settle down and start a family. If Charli XCX is ostensibly at the highest point in her career, then why, she asks on Brat, do these tears come at night?

The rollout for Brat would have you believe it’s an album of nonstop club hits: The singer made stops at Boiler Room and The Lot Radio, two electronic club institutions that, like Charli, have built their legacies on bringing the gritty, chaotic energy of an all-night warehouse party into the homes of the terminally online. The album opens on a packed dance floor, with “360” calling out that night’s VIPs — Julia Fox, Gabriette — by name. On “Club Classics,” she’s tired of performing away from her fans on stage, flanked by back-up dancers — she wants to party to her own music instead.