I began 2025 with the express intent to refresh and start a new chapter and here I am, two months into the new year, not only watching but (gasp!) enjoying the 2025 Grammys. Scandal. Shock and awe. I’ve been beating the drum of “the Grammys suck” for years, and I’m still not convinced that they’ll be good again next year (the Beatles and the Rolling Stones both won major awards this year for god’s sake) but 2025 was the year that the Grammys got it right. Beyonce got her big trophy. Kendrick won Record of the Year and didn’t have to rap with Imagine Dragons. Even the performance lineup was spot on, which is what convinced me to actually pay attention to the show. The promise of seeing Janelle Monae and Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan and Doechii and Charli Motherfucking XCX (and Bela Fleck???) all hit the same stage paid off. Benson Boone also did some very nice flips, I suppose.
I’ve loved Charli XCX’s music for a long time, and I’m so glad she’s had a great year, but Brat never quite clicked for me like I wanted it to. “Von Dutch” is an all-time banger and some of the remixes are truly special but I will admit, I was disappointed at first. I thought the record fell victim to the same affliction as Hannah Diamond’s album or much of AG Cook’s solo records - the music is good enough but falls just left of satisfying. Catharsis is the most important element of a successful pop song. PC Music’s output is all immaculately produced and clearly has a vision, but too much of it misses the balance of tension and release - hence why PC Music proper was so often overshadowed by label-adjacent artists like Kero Kero Bonito or 100 gecs or SOPHIE. Brat suffers compositionally from the same issue, but when Charli closed out the night on Sunday she stole the show on a bill that should have been a coronation for multiple other stars.
Charli’s music is direct. Brat was meteoric for its rollout and its sonics and its character studies but the lyrical brashness is what really sets it apart and had me picking my jaw off the floor. Charli slashes any attempt at mystery or allegory and presents you with an uncut gem of an experience, harsh in a way that doesn’t obscure its crystalline beauty but refuses to be seen as an engineered and perfect object.1 A side effect is that none of the music feels surreal, even the songs about imagining hypothetical futures like “I think about it all the time.”
The other three big winners of 2025 in pop (Sabrina, Chappell, Doechii) inhabit worlds at a slight remove from reality. Chappell’s is the most obvious because the entire Chappell Roan project is an exercise in drag. She asks, what if this imagined performance paradise at the Pink Pony Club were real? What if moms from Tennessee knew about the Pink Pony Girls enough to lament them by name? What if the joy of being onstage in your heels were so huge it could blot out the harsh light of reality? What if rodeo clowns, what if Joan of Arc, what if the Statue of Liberty? Sabrina is less theatrical and idealistic, but she still lives in the other-world of classic pop storytelling. Her songs are universal, but with a slight edge of the surreal. It doesn’t matter whether or not the affairs have really happened, whether her head is actually over her heels or just turning with imagination. Doechii2 comes the closest, particularly on history’s slappiest therapy session “Denial is a River”, but she still tends towards the theatrical with her faux-sitcom rollout. She lets you in, but she lets you into her redecorated, relatively healed past. Brat exists now. Here. Charli began her Grammys performance by arriving at the arena parking garage, not by raising the curtain on Brat World. Chappell and Sabrina and Doechii opened a window into their worlds but Charli brought the party to ours. Charli drove up because she was bringing the party to the building, not just to the stage. Look at her set dressing, or lack thereof. Apart from a convenient platform in the parking lot and a pile of underwear, Charli’s set dressing was 100% Human. AG Cook flanked her entrance and the Dare (otherwise a stranger to the concept of soul-baring realism) snogged at the center of the “Guess” pantystorm3 while her dancers embraced barely-choreographed club eclecticism4. She doesn’t shoot for visual spectacle because the spectacle of Brat is emotional and egregoric. It’s the spectacle of feeling your hurt and your anxiety but knowing that in the throbbing masses of the club they won’t matter, because you’ll melt into the throng and find your collective release. To be Brat is to be stuck in your head, but it’s also to get out of your head and find thrill in the moment. Brat is here and Brat is now. You don’t need to enter the world of Brat because you are already in it and you just need to find that release.5
It’s incredible that something as direct as Brat emerged from the artifice-enshrouded world of PC Music. AG Cook said on Ben Cardew’s wonderful Line Noise podcast that he was more interested in artist concept projects (like Hey QT) than album projects. Even his newer material released under his own name tend towards the epic, whether in the sheer scope of 7G or the high concept of Britpop and the Interstella 5555-esque “Soulbreaker” video. SOPHIE was a world builder to the core, constructing a Whole New World to inhabit as self-designed perfection. In that sense the character of Chappell is almost closer to SOPHIE than Charli is, but Chappell is retrograde and referential in a way than SOPHIE ever was. Even the first peak of the experimental rave-oriented version of Charli, “Vroom Vroom,” was pop surrealism with a PC Music plastic coating. Brat sheds that cocoon. Brat is a sound born of artifice, surrounded by artifice, that succeeds because it is immediate and intimate.