Charli XCX
photo: elena ternovaja · cc by-sa 3.0 ↗Charli XCX spent her teens performing at illegal East London warehouse raves before turning MySpace demos into a decade-plus run through bubblegum pop, PC Music-adjacent experimentalism, and the culture-swallowing 2024 album Brat. She treats pop as a genre to be dismantled and rebuilt in real time, pulling equally from Y2K teen-pop gloss and the abrasive, synthetic extremity of hyperpop. Few contemporary pop stars move as fluidly between chart bait and art-damaged noise.
SOPHIE produced Charli's genre-scrambling Vroom Vroom EP and became her longtime collaborator and creative touchstone, pushing her toward bubblegum-bass extremity.
listen forCompare the rubbery, hyperreal synths of SOPHIE's solo 'Immaterial' to 'Vroom Vroom,' the SOPHIE-produced Charli track where those same crushed, candy-colored textures first landed in her own catalog.
Charli has named Britney as her pop-star north star since childhood, and Brat closed the loop directly by sampling and namechecking her.
listen forPlay Britney's aching, Auto-Tuned 'Everytime' against Charli's 'Spring Breakers,' which directly samples it and cites Britney's 'Outrageous' — the plush, confessional balladry of one bleeds straight into the other.
Charli's sneering, half-rapped delivery and bratty club-kid persona echo the mid-2000s Ed Banger/electroclash scene Uffie helped define, a lineage Charli has cited directly.
listen forSet Uffie's deadpan, vocoder-flecked 'Pop the Glock' next to Charli's 'Von dutch' — the same flat, too-cool sing-rap cadence riding maximalist electro-pop production.