Since coming back to school, has anyone asked you if you had a “brat summer”? Were you thinking, what on earth does that mean?
On June 7, singer Charli XCX released her 6th studio album titled “brat.” Previously, Charli had gained a reputation for being a high-energy synth pop artist who wrote and produced viciously catchy songs like “Fancy (feat. Iggy Azalea),” “I Love It (feat. Icona Pop),” and “Boom Clap.” Despite creating “pop-bible” material, Charli has never reached the ranks of the pop girlies such as Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, or Katy Perry. Arguably, that all changed in June as her new album created a whole new aesthetic/phase/way of living: brat summer.
To fully understand this aesthetic, we start by observing the album cover. It’s “brat” written in a pixelated arial font in front of a lime green background. That’s it. It is so simple and boring that it’s a bold and inspiring statement. In the music industry, there is such pressure for creators to produce flawless albums with work-of-art covers. Charli chose to veer right from that standard and stick to something so beautifully simple with an arial font yet so bold with the blinding lime green background color. An ongoing theme of this album is to give off minimum effort, maximum slay energy.
The songs in the album reflect y2k clubbing culture. The album is nostalgic and the lyrics promote a certain way of living. To live a “brat lifestyle” is to embrace your inner chaos and not be mindful and demure. It’s to turn being a hot mess into a good thing. As stated in an article in Today News, someone living in the “season of the brat [is living by] party animal antics, cool-girl style, and lime green everything.” A “brat” contradicts the “clean girls” of the world. In 2023, a new aesthetic was born on Tiktok called the “clean girl” aesthetic that romanticized simplicity and tidiness. A “brat” is bold. She takes risks, she embraces being uncomfortable, and she’s truthful and confident in how she feels. A “clean girl” is polite, polished, and clean cut. The trend this summer was to say goodbye to being “clean,” and hello to being the crazed center of attention without even trying to be.
So, if anyone is looking at your lime-green pencil in math class and saying “that’s so brat-coded,” you now know what that means. Evidently, many people have been living by the “brat” philosophy because today #bratsummer has over 125k posts on Tiktok and the album has 500 million streams on Spotify. Did you have a brat summer? I guess a better question is, “were you bumpin’ that?”