Okay, happy Monday. It is February 16th, 2026.
And, you know, if you have been anywhere near
a screen, a speaker, or, well, frankly, just
civilization in general over the last few weeks,
you know exactly who is dominating the cultural
conversation right now. It would be genuinely
difficult to miss her. I mean, she is absolutely
everywhere. We are talking about the woman who,
just a little over a week ago, finally walked
away with big hardware. Two shiny new Grammys
for Brat. Finally, yes. Best dance pop recording
for Van Dutch. And of course, best dance electronic
album. But honestly, the awards almost feel like
a footnote to everything else that's happening
in her orbit. Well, it's the convergence of everything,
isn't it? You have the awards, sure. That's the
industry validation. But then you also have the
release of her film, The Moment, which dropped
last month. Right. And on top of that, the news
that has all the film buffs, you know, completely
losing their minds. Yeah. She is currently scoring
the Emerald Fennell adaptation of Weathering
Heights. Which is such a flex. I mean, come on.
From I Love It to Emily Bronte, it's a trajectory
that really shouldn't make any sense. Not at
all. But somehow, with her, it makes perfect
sense. We are, of course, dedicating today's
deep dive to the one and only Charlie XCX. The
defining architect of the last decade of pop
music. And I really don't use that title lightly.
No, and that's the mission for today, right?
We need to figure out how this specific person,
this girl from Essex, who started out posting
what she called terrible demos on MySpace and
playing illegal warehouse raves while she was
still in school, how did she manage to... basically
hijacked the mainstream. How did she become the
bridge between the weirdest, most aggressive
underground sounds and the absolute center of
global pop culture? It is the paradox of Charlie.
It really is. She's this massive global superstar
who operates with the mindset of a, you know,
a niche underground artist. She's a hit maker
who is famously kind of tamed to hate pop music.
Exactly. And she's the party girl icon who is
actually a notorious, relentless workaholic.
It's all these contradictions. And as we sit
here. in 2026, looking back at the last two years
especially, that tension seems to be the fuel.
You know, that battle between being commercially
viable, selling out arenas, winning Grammys,
and maintaining that weird experimental edge.
That's it. That's the core of it. So we have
a massive staff of sources today. We're going
through all the biographical archives, the discography
deep cuts, the brat era interviews, and of course
all the breaking news about her shift into cinema.
Let's start at the beginning. Because I think
when people see Charlie XCX now, the fashion
icon, the film producer, it's so easy to forget
just how scrappy her origin story really is.
This was not a Disney Channel pipeline situation.
Oh, far from it. So let's go back to 1992. Charlotte
Emma Aitchison is born in Cambridge. And her
background is interesting right off the bat.
Her dad, John, is Scottish and an entrepreneur.
Her mom, Shamira, is Indian -Ugandan, a former
nurse and flight attendant. And she grew up in
Essex, Stard Hill specifically. Right. And while
she was listening to the Spice Girls and Britney
Spears, like basically every other kid in the
late 90s and early 2000s, her reaction to it
was different. She started writing songs when
she was just 14. But here is the detail that
I think defines her entire career. She didn't
just write them in her bedroom and, you know,
hope for the best. She treated herself like a
business from day one. You're talking about the
loan, right? The loan, yes. Oh, yeah. She convinced
her parents to lend her money to record her first
album. Which is just wild for a 14 -year -old.
Most kids are asking for, I don't know, a new
bike or a PlayStation. She's asking for seed
capital. It just shows this level of belief or
maybe delusion, which you kind of need to be
a pop star. That is pretty rare. So she records
this album, which she calls 14, and she starts
posting the tracks on MySpace. The MySpace era,
the golden age of terrible HTML and those autoplaying
songs on your profile. It was the Wild West,
but Charlie wasn't posting, like, polished teen
pop. She was posting what she later described
as gimmicky dance tracks and fucking terrible
MySpace music. She's her own worst critic. Always.
But, crucially, it caught the ear of a promoter
in East London. And this guy was running illegal
warehouse raves. This is the part of the story
that always blows my mind. You have this schoolgirl
from Hertfordshire. She is attending a fairly
posh private school. She's getting good grades
in art. And on the weekends, she's putting on
these insane outfits and traveling to Hackney
to perform at illegal raves. And her parents
were driving her. That is the best part. I just
have this image of her dad standing in the back
of some grimy warehouse. you know, holding her
coat while she's on stage screaming over these
crazy electro beats. It speaks to the incredible
support system she had for sure, but also just
that contrast. She was living these two completely
different lives. And she needed a name, right?
So she was billed under her MSN messenger screen
name. CharlieXCX. She literally just used her
screen name because she didn't think to change
it. She admitted later she had no idea it would
stick forever. She just thought it was for, like,
one flyer. I remember reading somewhere that
people thought the XCX was some deep, edgy code,
like X -rated content X or something. Yeah. Nope.
It stood for Kiss Charlie Kiss. No way. Yeah.
It was just a teenage girl sign -off. It's so
aggressively mid -2000s. She kept it. She said
recently that she decided to keep it so she wouldn't
pull a prince and change her name to some unpronounceable
symbol, which I think shows she understands the
value of branding. Even back then. But it wasn't
all just, you know, cool raves and supportive
parents. There was a darker side to her school
years that I think really informs the outsider
status that she still holds on to. Absolutely.
She has spoken pretty extensively about the bullying
she faced. She was, in her own words, a half
Indian girl with frizzy hair in a predominantly
white environment in Bishop Startford. Yeah.
She felt like she stuck out. She felt othered.
And she said kids would chant horrible things
at her on the bus. It was really quite traumatic.
That feeling of being the weird girl never really
leaves you, does it? Even when you become a global
icon. I don't think it does. And I think. That
friction, that feeling of wanting to be accepted
but also kind of resenting the people who wouldn't
accept you is the engine of so much of her music.
So by 2010, she gets signed to Asylum Records.
On paper, she's made it. She's 18. She has a
major label deal. But she described herself during
this period as completely lost. Totally lost.
She gave that interview to The Guardian where
she said she hated pop music at the time. Hated
it. While assigned to a pop label. Right. She
wanted to make bad rap music. She was completely
obsessed with Uffy and that whole Ed Banger record
sound coming out of Paris. She didn't want to
be a polished pop star. She wanted to be gritty
and cool. But she was stuck in the major label
machine, which, you know, just tries to smooth
out all your interesting edges. And then the
accident happens, the accidental hitmaker phase.
Because for someone who claimed to hate pop,
she somehow wrote one of the most undeniable,
inescapable pop songs of the entire 2010s. I
love it. I crashed my car into the bridge. I
don't care. I love it. You could not escape that
song in 2012. It was in every commercial, every
club, every movie trailer. The story of that
song is just fascinating. She wrote it in about
half an hour in a hotel room in Sweden. Just
pure, unfiltered frustration. So she was just
venting. Totally. But she hated it for herself.
She thought it was too shouty, too basic. She
just couldn't reconcile it with the cool underground
image she was so desperately trying to build.
So she gave it away. She gave it to Icona Pop,
this Swedish duo. And they turned it into a global
smash. It went to number one in the UK, top 10
in the US. And Charlie is just... The feature.
She's the girl who wrote it, but she's not the
face of it. And she's watching this thing she
created just take over the world. And then it
happens again. It happens again with Fancy in
2014. She writes the hook for Iggy Azalea. First
things first, I'm the realist. And that becomes
the song of the summer. I mean, it is still her
most streamed song ever, even now. And then finally,
she gets her own hit. A proper solo hit. Boom
Clap. Boom Clap from the Fault in Our Stars soundtrack.
And you really cannot get more mainstream, middle
of the road. pop culture than a John Green movie
adaptation in 2014. That was peak Tumblr era
culture. Exactly. So by the end of 2014, Charli
XCX is statistically a massive pop star. She
has multiple platinum records. She's on the radio
constantly, but internally. She is miserable.
Totally disconnected. Completely. She feels like
an imposter. She's winning a game she doesn't
even want to play. And this is the moment where
most artists would just cash in. You become the
next Katy Perry. You make Boom Clap 2 .0. You
ride that wave until it crashes. But Charlie
did something that I think really defines her
legacy. She pivoted. Hard. She rejected the machine.
And it started with the album Sucker in late
2014. She was so frustrated with the music industry,
with being told what to do, that she went to
Sweden, basically isolated herself, and made
a punk -inspired album in like a month. That's
where we get break the rules. Which is so on
the nose. I don't want to go to school. I just
want to break the rules. It's extremely bratty.
It is. It's like the Ramones meets bubblegum
pop. She said she was listening to Weezer and
the Hives and just wanted to make something loud
and obnoxious. It was her way of giving the finger
to the polished pop world that had tried to claim
her. But honestly, sucker. Yeah. It was just
the warm up, wasn't it? Yeah. The real revolution,
the moment the timeline really splits, is 2015
and 2016. Oh, absolutely. This is the PC music
turning point. And we throw that term around
a lot, PC music, but we should probably take
a second to define what that actually means for
people who weren't, you know, terminally online
in 2015. Yes, please. Because it was a whole
scene. Right. So PC music was a label and an
art collective, and it was primarily led by a
producer named A .G. Cook. Their whole aesthetic
was, well, it was... taking pop tropes and accelerating
them until they broke. It was incredibly synthetic,
high gloss with these pitched up, almost chipmunk
-like vocals and textures that sounded like plastic
and latex. It was almost a satire of consumerism,
but at the same time, it genuinely loved pop
melodies. That's a great description. I always
said it was music that sounded like it was made
by a sentient energy drink. That is a perfect
description. And then in that same orbit, you
had Sophie. Sophie was a producer. Or the visionary,
really, who was associated with that scene. And
she was making some of the most radical sound
design in history. Sounds that felt like metal
stretching or bubbles popping or rubber snapping.
And Charlie meets them. She meets Sophie. And
they just click. They realize they are both completely
bored with the status quo of pop music. And together
they create the Vroom Vroom EP in 2016. I remember
hearing Vroom Vroom for the first time, the title
track. It starts with this like sleek, almost
robotic whisper, let's ride. And then the beat
drops and it just sounds like a car crash made
of chrome. It was such a shock. It was tonal
whiplash for her existing fans. I mean, if you
were a boom clap fan, Vroom just sounded like
noise. It was abrasive. It was aggressive. It
was avant -pop. And the critics were confused.
Is that a word? Yeah. Confused as being generous.
A lot of people hated it. Pitchfork gave it a
4 .5 out of 10. They totally dismissed it. But
Charlie didn't care. She knew she'd hound her
sound. This was the moment she stopped trying
to be a normal pop star and started building
her own world. And this leads directly to the
mixtape era. We're talking number one Angel and,
of course, Pop 2. Pop 2 is the holy grail. Yeah.
It really is. If you ask any diehard Charlie
fan, the Angels as they're called, what her best
work is, I'd say 90 % of them will say Pop 2.
Okay, so why? What makes that specific mixtape
so special? It's the blueprint for the 2020s.
It was released back in 2017, but it sounds like
it could have been made yesterday. The production
by A .G. Cook is so dense and layered, but also
incredibly emotional. And the way she uses autotune,
she uses it as an instrument. It's not there
to hide her voice. It's there to texturize it,
to bend it into these inhuman emotional shapes.
You listen to a track like track 10. Which we
gave Blame It On Your Love later. Right. But
the original track 10, it just. It creates this
swirling digital emotional landscape that feels
so incredibly human despite being totally synthetic.
It's that paradox again. And the features, the
collaboration on that project is insane. The
features are key. Because she wasn't just singing
on the track. She was curating. She was a creative
director. She brought in Carly Rae Jepsen, who
is very much a mainstream pop artist, and put
her on a track with this really distinct, futuristic,
underground production. Right. She brought in
Kim Petras before she was huge. She brought in
Cupcake, the rapper. She brought in Jay Park
from Korea, Pablo Vittar from Brazil. She created
this global network of weirdo pop. But we have
to talk about why she was releasing mixtapes
instead of official albums, because it wasn't
just an artistic choice, was it? Yeah. It was
a reaction to a total disaster. The leaks. This
is such a crucial part of the lore. In 2017,
Charlie had finished her third official studio
album. It was done. It was ready to go. And then
hackers leaked the entire thing online. Oh, that
has to be just devastating for an artist. Yeah.
It's been years working on something and it just
gets dumped on a random forum for free. It was
completely traumatizing for her. She said she
felt violated, like her house had been broken
into. And typically a label would say, well,
the cat's out of the bag. Let's just release
it anyway and try to salvage it. Right. Just
rush it out. But Charlie said no. She scrapped
the entire project. She refused to officially
release what the fans now call XCX World, the
leak. album which is a huge power move but also
a massive creative and financial risk it is but
it forced her to change her entire creative process
she realized she couldn't sit on music for two
years waiting for a traditional album rollout
because it might just get leaked anyway she had
to be faster she had to be more fluid and the
mixtape format allowed exactly the mixtape format
allowed her to completely bypass the label's
red tape she could make a song on a tuesday and
decide to release it on a friday it gave her
all the control so the leaks in a really weird
roundabout way, created the fast Charlie that
we know today. Precisely. It turned a complete
disaster into a new methodology. It made her
incredibly nimble. Which, as it turns out, prepared
her perfectly for the next global disaster, the
pandemic. 2020, the world just shuts down. And
while most artists were either delaying their
albums indefinitely or doing these awkward acoustic
live streams from their living rooms, Charlie
decided to make an entire album from scratch
in six weeks. How I'm feeling now. This project
was just fascinating because she completely tore
down the wall between the artist and the fan.
She was on Zoom calls with hundreds of fans asking
them what they thought about certain lyrics.
She was on Instagram Live testing out beats A
.G. Cook was sending her in real time. She asked
fans to design the artwork. to direct music videos
from their own homes. It was open source pop
music. It was a community project. And because
of that, it was so raw and immediate. She was
stuck in a house with her boyfriend at the time.
And the lyrics deal with that specific kind of
lockdown claustrophobia. You know, songs like
Detonate or Enemy. These are songs about deeply
loving someone, but also feeling like you might
actually explode if you have to look at them
for one more second in the same room. It captured
the mood of 2020 better than almost anything
else. That manic, anxious, bored, loving, hateful
energy all at once. And technically, it was a
triumph. She recorded all her own vocals on a
standard microphone. A .G. Cook was sending beats
remotely. It proved you don't need a million
dollar studio to make a masterpiece. You just
need vision and a laptop. So she's done the punk
album. She's done the avant -garde mixtapes.
She's done the DIY quarantine album. She has
firmly established herself as the queen of the
underground, the critical darling. And then she
does a complete 180 again. Clash 2022. The concept
for Crash was so interesting because she basically
came out and said, for this album, I'm going
to play the character of a sellout pop star.
It was her final album for a contract with Atlantic
Records, a contract she signed when she was just
a teenager. And she decided to go out with a
bang by giving the label exactly what they had
always wanted from her. Which was a big, glossy,
80s inspired mainstream pop album. Exactly. The
aesthetic was very... Deal with the devil. There
was blood, vampires, car crashes, this dark,
knowing glamour. She was really leaning into
the pop machine. She was. She channeled Janet
Jackson. She learned choreography for the first
time in her career. She put on the polished outfits.
And the beautiful irony is it worked. Crash became
her first number one album in the UK. She proved
she could beat the main pop girls at their own
game. Anytime she wanted to. But she did it with
a wink. Every interview she gave during that
era, she was sort of breaking the fourth wall,
acknowledging that she was performing the role
of the major label bop star. It was performance
art that just happened to chart really well.
Which brings us to the era that really changed
everything. The reason she is holding those Grammys
right now. The Brat era. 2024. The summer of
Brat. I don't think we can overstate how completely
ubiquitous this was. That specific shade of lime
green. That square was everywhere. Let's talk
about that green for a second, because it wasn't
just a random choice. It's tied to the fact that
Charlie has synesthesia. Okay, break that down.
Synesthesia is when your sense is kind of cross
-wire, right? Specifically, she has chromesthesia,
which is sound -to -color synesthesia. So when
she hears music, she sees specific colors. She
has said in interviews that she loves music that
looks black or pink or purple or red to her.
Pop 2, for example, she says, is very purple
and sparkly. Okay, so what about green? She hates
it. She has said she hates music that sounds
green, yellow, or brown. She finds those colors
sonically to be really unappealing. So for Brat,
an album she considers her masterpiece. She deliberately
chose this aggressive, ugly, slime green, I think
it's roughly Pantone 3570C as the cuddle. So
she picked the color she hates the most for her
favorite album. It was a challenge. It was a
provocation. She wanted to take something that
was on its face, kind of repulsive, and force
the world to look at it. until they found it
cool. It was a whole statement on ugly beauty.
And my God, did it work. It completely took over.
You had the whole brat summer trend. It was this
massive rejection of the clean girl aesthetic.
You know, the beige tones, the slick back buns,
the green juices that had dominated social media
for years. Brat was the antidote. It was about
being messy. It was about smoking cigarettes,
having a breakdown in the club, being a little
chaotic and loud. It was a little relatable.
It tapped into. this deep fatigue people were
feeling with having to present a perfect curated
life online. And the music backed it up 100%,
360, Von Dutch. These are aggressive, confident,
almost arrogant tracks. But then you have a song
like Apple. Which sparked that massive TikTok
dance trend. A huge trend. And the cultural reach
just went all the way to the top. We have to
mention the Kamala Harris moment. That's unavoidable.
Right. So when President Biden stepped down from
a race and Kamala Harris launched her presidential
campaign, her social media team immediately adopted
the brat aesthetic. They used the lime green
background, the low res, sans serif font. And
look. Regardless of your politics, just looking
at it from a cultural analysis perspective, that
is insane. You have a potential president of
the United States using the branding of a rave
pop album that has lyrics about doing bumps of
coke in the bathroom. It just showed that Charlie
had finally permeated the monoculture. She wasn't
just for the cool kids in the know anymore. She
was the culture. Yeah. And the critics agreed.
Billboard, Rolling Stone, everyone named Brat
the album of the year. And the Metacritic score?
Yeah. It's a 95. That is historically high. That
puts it in the same league as classic, universally
agreed upon masterpieces. And she just kept feeding
the fire with the remix album, Brat and Bat.
It's completely different, but also still brat.
The title alone is just genius. But the collaborators
she got, she got everyone. Ariana Grande. Addison
Rae. But the most important one, the one that
felt like a real cultural moment, was the remix
with Lorde. The girl so confusing remix. This
was a moment of genuine vulnerability and kind
of pop culture therapy. For years, the media
and fans had pitted Charlie and Lorde against
each other. They were the two alternative pop
girls with big dark hair who came up around the
same time. Right. There was always this narrative
of a rivalry. And on the original track, Charlie
sings about her own insecurity and her complicated
feelings about Lorde. She sings, people say we're
alike. They say we've got the same hair. She
talks about feeling like Lorde looked down on
her, thought she was annoying. And then she gets
Lorde on the remix to respond to those exact
lyrics. And Lorde's verse was so brutal and beautiful.
She admitted that she was isolating herself during
that period because she felt insecure about her
body and her public image, not because she hated
Charlie. They basically worked out their beef
in real time on a track that then went to number
one. It was reality TV meets high art. And then,
just to confuse everyone, she throws Bon Iver
on a remix. Of course she does. Why not? Which
brings us to where she is now, February 2026,
because Brat, as huge as it was, already feels
like it was ages ago in Charlie time. She has
already moved on to the next 10 things. Her personal
life seems to have settled down a bit, though.
She got married last summer, July 2025. Yes,
to George Daniel, the drummer and main producer
for the 1975. Which is basically the royal wedding
of British indie pop. It really is. They had
a small town hall ceremony in London and then
a big lavish wedding in Sicily. But even in her,
you know, settled married life, she's pushing
buttons. You're talking about the Smart List
interview? Just a couple of weeks ago, she went
on the Smart List podcast with Jason Bateman,
Sean Hayes and Will Arnett. And she was very
candid. She said she doesn't really want to have
children. And there was this really awkward moment
where Jason Bateman kind of questioned her on
it. Oh, I heard this. Sort of implying that,
oh, she's young. She might change her mind. Just
such a classic condescending dad thing to say
to a woman. It is. But Charlie stood her ground.
She said she feels like she's married to her
work. She feels her art is her legacy, her child
in a way. And it sparked a lot of debate online,
but it fits her brand perfectly. She refuses
to follow the expected script. You know, first
comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby
in a baby carriage. Charlie is just rewriting
that entire nursery rhyme. And the work that
she's married to is evolving. We aren't just
talking about albums and mixtapes anymore. She
is becoming a film mogul. This is the new frontier
for 2026. She produced the film The Moment, which
came out last month, and it's this gritty, hyper
-real drama that's very much inspired by the
rave scenes she grew up in. And she's acting
more. She was in the Faces of Death remake. She's
in the new film I Want Your Sex. But the big
news, the one that really signals the shift in
her career, is the score. The fact that she is
composing the entire score for Emerald Fennell's
Weathering Heights. That is such a serious pivot.
Emerald Fennell, I mean, promising young woman.
Saltburn. She has a very specific, twisted, pop
-infused aesthetic. So Charlie seems like a perfect
match, but scoring a gothic period piece. It
suggests that Charlie is looking at a career
like Trent Reznor or Johnny Greenwood. You know,
musicians who started in rock or pop and then
became these serious Oscar -winning composers.
It's a bid for longevity. Pop stars have a shelf
life. Composers can work forever. And the new
music she's been releasing reflects that, too.
Yeah. She released that track house late last
year. Featuring John Cale. From the Velvet Underground.
I mean. You cannot signal your artistic intentions
more clearly than that. The Velvet Underground
is basically the genesis of all art rock. So
by working with John Cale, Charlie is placing
herself directly in that lineage. She's saying,
I'm not just the I love it girl. I'm an avant
-garde artist with real history. And wall of
sound. The track that dropped in January of this
year, it's dense. It feels orchestral, but it
still has those glitched out futuristic vocals.
It's the synthesis. That's what it is. She's
taking the classical sweeping elements of a film
score and mashing them together with the hyper
modern PC music production she pioneered. It
sounds like the future again. So let's zoom out.
What does this all mean? We've looked at the
rave kid, the reluctant pop star, the punk, the
curator. the sellout, the brat, and now maybe
the composer. I think CharlieXCX represents the
final collapse of the binary. For decades, we
had this rule in music. You were either underground,
which meant you were cool, credible, but probably
broke, or you were mainstream, which meant you
were kind of lame, but rich and famous. You couldn't
be both. You were either Nirvana or you were
New Kids on the Block. There was no in -between.
Exactly. Charlie proved that distinction is dead.
She proved that you can make the weirdest, most
abrasive, sometimes ugly music possible. And
if you have the vision and package it right,
you can sell out Madison Square Garden and win
Grammys with it. She turned outsider status into
the ultimate insider credential. Everyone wants
to be in Charlie's world now. Yeah. The weird
girl from Bishop Stortford, she won. She absolutely
did. And the final provocative thought I have
is this. Charlie began her career actively hating
pop music. She spent 10 years deconstructing
it, mocking it, breaking it apart, and putting
it back together wrong. But in doing so, she
actually saved it. She made pop music interesting
and dangerous again. Which raises the question,
if she is now scoring films and working with...
legends like John Cale. Is her pop star era actually
over? Or is she just redefining what a pop star
does in the late 2020s? Maybe the new pop star
isn't just a singer. Maybe they are a world builder,
a composer, a director, a curator. That is the
question we're going to be watching for the rest
of 2026 for sure. Indeed. We want to know what
you think about all this. Is the pivot to film
the right move for her? Are you still bumping
brat two years later? Let us know. I certainly
am. It's still on repeat. Check out the show
notes for this one. We've linked all the deep
cuts we talked about, the interviews, and a playlist
of every song we mentioned today, including that
Wild John Cale collaboration. It's definitely
worth a deep dive. Thanks for listening. We'll
see you on the next one. Bye. See ya.