You can practically smell the scent of sweat, poppers, and peach ice vape smoke through the screen. A packed New York warehouse party: Charli XCX struts out of her dressing room with the charisma of a cult leader. Rocking sunglasses, her wavy black hair matching the puffer jacket draped off her shoulders, she radiates an unbothered cool, a messy recklessness. XCX pouts at the camera, finally removing her shades to reveal Cleopatra eyeliner and a T-shirt that reads CULT CLASSIC. The crowd rages, the beats drop, and a glowing forcefield of iPhones remain hoisted aloft, documenting every second.
Within a few hours of sign-ups going live in mid February, XCX’s Boiler Room performance shattered the company’s RSVP records. Over 35,000 acolytes vied for just 400 spots at the Bushwick rave, given away via a lottery. Later that night, XCX was joined on stage by her frequent collaborators and avant-pop producers AG Cook and Easyfun, as well as her fiancé George Daniel, the drummer and producer for The 1975. Her friend Julia Fox and TikTok phenom turned multi-hyphenate Addison Rae turned up too. Apart from Beyoncé and Taylor Swift’s tours (the latter of whom tapped XCX to open for her in 2018), it’s difficult to conceive of a recent event from a solo artist that has generated anything near this level of online buzz.
Jacket by Loewe. T-shirt by Sarah Aphrodite. Shorts by Guess. Shoes by Gianvito Rossi.
“It was crazy. It felt like I could really connect with my fans and break through the noise,” XCX says. Two months later, she is lounging poolside at 9.30am on a Friday in Palm Springs, the Southern California desert town so eternally sunny that it can feel almost sinister. These are not the hours you typically associate with the 31-year-old, whose deconstructed club pop is intrinsically built for the type of illegal late-night raves that Boiler Room aspires to recreate.
Those lucky enough to win the ticket lottery described the event with the rapture usually reserved for dance music lore: the libidinous disco funk spun at Manhattan’s Paradise Garage, or the acid-house bacchanalia at Manchester’s Haçienda. When the performance was finally released on YouTube a month later, it was instantly canonised by millions of Charli’s “Angels”:
@joshhart775
Born to be a rave dj, forced to be a pop diva
9K
@talkstobees
Born too late to buy a house in my 20s but just in time to dance to this legendary set in my room
2.4K
@ajw2571
my kids will have generational trauma from my not being there
7.1K
Boiler Room’s own caption called the show “a cultural reset”, which underscores the impact of an event that symbolically shook off the last lingering after-effects of what the pandemic wrought on nightlife. In a culture of corporate “experiences”, XCX created what has become an increasingly rare phenomenon: an organic moment, one that artfully straddled both the digital and physical worlds. “It feels like underground scenes are back and people just want to be in physical spaces and be a part of something,” she says.
As organic as it seemed, the Boiler Room set was in fact the opening act in the several-months-long masterclass in viral marketing that is the rollout of XCX’s new album, Brat. “I think this campaign is so good because we’re so f*cking bullish and laser-focused on every single f*cking thing,” XCX says. “I’ve had hour-long discussions about the positioning of font or like what I’m gonna post on f*cking Instagram… There’s no weak sh*t going on in the way that there are with some other pop campaigns right now.”
Brat highlights the unique position in music XCX inhabits, after a dozen or so years of nonlinear ascent. In the UK, XCX is worshipped by pop fans, LGBTQIA+ audiences and music critics alike, who revere her songcraft and self-aware ability to puncture genre and expectations. But in America, she can still seemingly go mostly unrecognised at a hotel pool. (As she says in another lyric on Brat, she’s “famous, but not quite”.) She’s an artist who abhors algorithm-friendly assembly-line songwriting, yet whose last album, 2022’s Crash, topped the UK charts. As Pitchfork described her in its rave review of “Von Dutch”, the lead single from Brat, she’s a “Y2K-obsessed millennial, fashion icon, and notoriously under-appreciated pop talent using wicked meta-commentary to dare you to call her a flop.” Or, as XCX herself puts it on “Von Dutch”: “cult classic, but I still pop.”
