Album Review: Charli_XCX's 'Charli' is one of the most intelligent and sophisticated pop albums of the past decade.
A backstory is perhaps not the most exciting way to start a review, but the drama behind “Charli” goes a long way toward explaining why, nearly five years after her last official album,At the end of 2014, then 22-year-old Charlotte Aitchison was on top of the world, with a smash hit as a solo artist , another as a co-writer and featured collaborator , another as a songwriter , and a critically feted sophomore album .
Yet somehow, all of that dissonance has resulted in a mature, fully realized and downright visionary album that achieves her oft-stated goal of “pushing pop as far as it can go.” “Charli” is the best of both worlds: It’s innovative and adventurous but not off-puttingly weird; it finds her fine-tuning her pop instincts without getting overly gushy.
The album blasts off with “Next Level Charli,” a brash manifesto — “I go hard, I go fast/ And I never look back” — that she delivers in a rapid-fire rap-singing style that slams a pop melody into the cadence of hip-hop. Underpinned by a shimmering synth hook and atmospheric bass notes, the song is driven almost entirely by her powerful flow.
Anchoring it all are several well-chosen duets: Charli is a serial collaborator who generously shares the spotlight, and the best of the multiple tag-teams here — particularly “Gone” with Christine and the Queens, “Cross You Out” with Sky Ferreira and “Warm” with Haim — find her and her partners tossing melodies back and forth like a Frisbee, one-upping each other with vocal flips and flourishes.
Many fans of prolific, possibly ADD-addled artists — from Prince and Kanye to Sia and Guided by Voices — often wish that those artists would release 12 great songs, rather than 50 interesting ones with 12 songs’ worth of truly great ideas in them. With “Charli” and the five years and dozens of songs that preceded it, we have both.
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