Brat Summer continues with a new New York Magazine cover story on Charli XCX, in which she reveals she was in the studio with Bon Iver and Danielle Haim the night before the interview was conducted in late July. Charli XCX and Bon Iver might sound like a surprising combo, though Justin did sing on Yeezus, an album Brat‘s been compared to, so maybe he’s bringing that kind of energy to the new Brat-related material that Charli says she’s been working on.
She recently posted a TikTok captioned “maybe one more remix and then ?,” and she also tells NY Mag that there may soon be a “full-length other project” that is “definitely in the bratosphere, so to speak.” We don’t know exactly what that means, though she refrains from calling it a remix album. She previously released Brat remixes with Lorde and Billie Eilish, and put out an extended version of Brat with three bonus tracks.
For those wondering if there’s any beef between Charli and Taylor Swift, or if they’ll “work it out on the remix,” Taylor actually gave NY Mag a quote for the article: “I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011. Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. She just takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, and she’s been doing it consistently for over a decade. I love to see hard work like that pay off.”
Charli also commented on her “kamala IS brat” tweet that went so viral that news anchors even started talking about it:
“To be on the right side of democracy, the right side of women’s rights, is hugely important to me,” Charli tells me when I ask about her becoming a cable-news talking point. She makes her statement one careful word at a time. “I’m happy to help to prevent democracy from failing forever.” It is an uncharacteristically earnest response. “I obviously knew what I was doing,” she continues, rolling her eyes, presumably at herself. But she did not expect her tweet to be viewed 55 million times. “Did I think me talking about being a messy bitch and, like, partying and needing a Bic lighter and a pack of Marlboro Lights would end up on CNN? No.” She is not, nor has she ever been, nor does she want to be “a political artist,” she says. “I’m not Bob Dylan, and I’ve never pretended to be.” Besides, she’s British; she can’t even vote in the U.S. “My music is not political,” she tells me. “Everything I do in my life feeds back into my art. Everything I say, wear, think, enjoy — it all funnels back into my art. Politics doesn’t feed my art.”
You can read the full feature here.