The breakthrough of London-girl Charli started with her vocal demo playing on Icona Pop’s
I Love it and her later writing and vocals on Iggy Azalea’s Fancy. Whilst radios hit replay on these tracks in the early 2010s, they ingrained our summer memories with Charli’s confident pop tone. Since then, she has explored more experimental sounds collaborating with pioneers in electronica and rap, including
SOPHIE, Brooke Candy, and Tommy Cash, who hybridised her sound without losing her cheeky, party-girl identity. In the same vein, the latest album has an emphasis on collaboration – featuring these three artists again – that gives birth to Charli’s most experimental album yet.
Charli’s streamlined moniker could nod to 21st-century narrowed attention spans, a product of information-saturated feeds glaring on screens worldwide. Collaborator Chris, previously Christine and the Queens, follows this trend too. Undoubtedly, Charli is deep in the modern fervour for accelerated documentation – something escaping to nature can remedy. After our interview she is going straight to the studio. Right now, spontaneity is a key part of Charli’s creative process, and she races to capture every moment. Her timetable leaves little room to breathe; she is busy crafting a coup d’état of modern pop alongside the brain from PC Music A. G. Cook, whose videogame-like robotic musical structures smirk ironically.
In terms of persona, Charli is bright and delightfully outspoken. The artist is like a type cast girl-next-door, she was even videoed recently doing a press release on a flimsy plastic garden chair. To what extent this party animal ruling festival stages and dressed in couture is living in the same world as her fan-base I can’t claim to know, but she has an infectious energy. Is she our Trojan horse into pop or not? I look for my prediction from Mark E Smith’s cryptic and sarcastic comment on mid-eighties punk, “The conventional is now the experimental” (
C’n’C-S Mithering, The Fall).