In the landscape of twenty-first century popular music, few artists have experienced a trajectory as peculiar as that of Charli XCX. Born Charlotte Emma Aitchison, the British singer songwriter spent the better part of a decade as a cult figure, revered by a dedicated niche audience while remaining largely peripheral to the mainstream consciousness. Then came 2024, and with it, Brat: an album that transformed her from an underground darling into a global phenomenon, complete with its own colour, its own aesthetic, its own summer, and even its own presidential campaign endorsement. The critical consensus surrounding Charli XCX has solidified into something approaching orthodoxy: she is a visionary, a boundary pusher, a hyperpop pioneer who has singlehandedly reshaped the contours of contemporary pop music. The Emptiness Behind the Aesthetic The most immediate evidence for Charli XCX’s overvaluation lies in the quality of her songwriting. Brat, the album that catapulted her to superstardom, has been celebrated as a masterpiece of raw, unfiltered expression. Yet a closer examination reveals a record sustained more by its marketing campaign than by its musical content. The Washington Examiner’s review of the album identified a fundamental weakness that runs throughout her catalogue: “Despite the accolades from music critics, Brat lacks musical intrigue. The weakest point comes midway through the record, where Charli’s lyrics suffer from repetition and a lack of rhythm — starting with ‘Everything is romantic,’ a three-minute song, half of which consists of the words, ‘Fall in love again and again,’ repeated multiple times.” This is the work of an artist who has learned that repetition can be mistaken for incantation, that a lack of content can be reframed as minimalist authenticity. The same critique applies to “Rewind,” where listeners encounter the profoundly unremarkable observation, “Sometimes I just want to turn back time / to a different time.” These are the banal musings of someone who has discovered that the appearance of introspection can substitute for introspection itself. The critical establishment has largely overlooked this vacancy, choosing instead to celebrate the album’s aesthetic coherence and cultural resonance as though these qualities compensated for the absence of substantial songcraft. One listener on Album of the Year articulated what many have felt but few have been willing to state publicly: “brat doesn’t introduce a compelling narrative theme like HIFN, it doesn’t pride itself on writing endlessly catchy pop songs like true romance nor does it showcase any of the mad scientist creativity of a pop 2 or a charli.” The album is carried by a handful of strong tracks while the remainder functions as filler, propped up by production values that distract from the underlying weakness of the compositions. This pattern, of style triumphing over substance, defines Charli XCX’s entire career. The Manufactured Nature of Her Persona Perhaps the most compelling evidence for Charli XCX’s overrated status is the fundamental inauthenticity that pervades her public persona. She has spent years oscillating between competing identities, unable to settle on who she actually is as an artist. In a 2025 interview with Vanity Fair, she admitted: “I think I’ve really struggled over the years, because I’ve never felt like I fit in. Am I supposed to be this underground left artist, or am I supposed to try and be this commercial package?” This is the admission of someone who has spent her career chasing whichever identity seemed most advantageous at any given moment. Her own description of Crash, her 2022 album, as her “major label sell-out” record reveals a troubling pattern. Charli XCX has repeatedly positioned herself as an underground artist forced to compromise with commercial forces, yet she has simultaneously pursued mainstream success with considerable enthusiasm. The tension between these impulses is not, as her defenders would have it, a source of artistic depth. It is a source of incoherence. She has been accused online of being an “industry plant,” a term that, while perhaps overly reductive, captures something essential about her career: she has never seemed entirely organic, never seemed to emerge from a coherent artistic vision, but rather has appeared as a product of careful positioning within the music industry’s ecosystem. Her mockumentary The Moment, released in 2026, only reinforces this perception. The film, which presents a fictionalised version of Charli XCX struggling with the pressures of sudden fame, has been described by critics as “pure brand management” rather than genuine artistic expression. Vulture’s review noted that “Charli is playing a version of herself in the film, but it’s not a cinematically interesting version” and that the film is “too afraid of its star” to offer anything more than a superficial portrait. The Boston Globe was even more direct, calling it a “muddled mockumentary” that “wastes the talents of superstar singer Charli XCX”. When an artist’s attempt to critique her own image becomes indistinguishable from the image itself, something has gone terribly wrong. The Cultural Phenomenon Without Cultural Substance The Brat phenomenon of 2024 represents one of the most striking examples of cultural hype detached from cultural substance. The album’s lime green cover became a meme; its aesthetic was adopted by everyone from college students to presidential campaigns; its title became shorthand for a particular kind of hedonistic, carefree attitude. But what, exactly, did it actually say? What ideas did it advance? What new ground did it break? The answer, upon examination, is surprisingly little. Brat has been described as “an ode to hedonism: to sleeping in late or not sleeping at all; to spending your last tenner on cheap cigarettes; to crawling out of bed, head banging, reeking of spirits and questioning your very existence, ready to go out and do it all again.” This is a hangover dressed up as philosophy. The album’s appeal lies in its vibes, in its surface. It is the musical equivalent of a nightclub bathroom selfie: momentarily compelling, immediately forgettable. Charli XCX herself has acknowledged that Brat brought her a “new audience” that “didn’t really get me.” This is a revealing admission. The very people who made her a superstar, who turned her into a cultural phenomenon, did not actually understand her work. They were responding to something else: the aesthetic, the meme, the moment. Charli XCX has become famous for being famous in a particular way, for representing a particular cultural moment, rather than for producing work of lasting value. The fact that she herself recognises this disconnect does not make it less damning; it makes it more so, because it suggests a knowing complicity in her own overvaluation. NME noted that The Moment is “too protracted and tonally uneven to work as a great mockumentary, but it has plenty of meme-worthy moments that TikTok will lap up.” This is the perfect summary of Charli XCX’s entire career: meme-worthy moments that social media will lap up, but little of substance beneath the surface. She has mastered the art of producing content that feels culturally significant in the moment without actually being culturally significant in any lasting sense. The Critical Consensus and Its Failures The critical establishment has played a significant role in Charli XCX’s overvaluation. Brat became the highest rated album of 2024 on Metacritic and currently sits as the fifteenth highest rated album of all time. This is an astonishing elevation for an album that, as even some of its defenders admit, is uneven and lyrically weak. The critical consensus has transformed a moderately interesting pop record into a masterpiece, and in doing so has revealed more about the state of music criticism than about the quality of the music itself. The pattern is familiar: an artist who has spent years on the margins finally achieves mainstream success, and critics, eager to demonstrate their cultural relevance and their long standing appreciation of the artist, rush to overpraise the work. The result is a feedback loop in which hype generates more hype, and critical discernment is sacrificed to the demands of cultural relevance. Charli XCX has benefited enormously from this dynamic, but the benefit has been undeserved. Even her defenders acknowledge that her work is uneven. The Guardian, in its review of The Moment, noted that while the film has “a smart idea at play,” there is “not a lot else”. CBC’s review observed that there is “as much to critique as there is to admire”. These qualifications, however, are often buried beneath declarations of her importance and influence. The result is a critical discourse that celebrates her potential rather than her achievements, that projects onto her work qualities it does not actually possess. The Commercial Reality The commercial success of Brat is undeniable. The album achieved double platinum status in the UK with 601,015 units, spent 103 consecutive weeks in the Top 75, and spawned multiple platinum tracks. Charli XCX’s master recordings produced an estimated $1.52 million in royalty revenues. These are impressive figures, but they do not constitute evidence of artistic merit. They constitute evidence of successful marketing. The remix edition of Brat, titled Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, has been described as feeling “somewhat like a cynical marketing ploy dreamt up by suited bigwigs”. This is precisely the kind of observation that critics have been reluctant to dwell upon, because it undermines the narrative of Charli XCX as an authentic artistic voice battling against corporate interests. Yet the evidence suggests that she is perfectly comfortable with corporate interests when they serve her purposes. The tension between her supposed anti capitalist critique and her enthusiastic participation in the commercial machinery of the music industry is a hypocrisy that her defenders have been all too willing to overlook. The Question of Influence Charli XCX has been credited with popularising hyperpop and bringing it to a mainstream audience. This is perhaps her most significant contribution to popular music, and it is not without value. However, influence is not the same as quality, and the elevation of hyperpop from a niche genre to a mainstream phenomenon does not automatically make Charli XCX a great artist. It makes her a successful populariser, a role that is important but hardly visionary. Moreover, the question of influence raises uncomfortable questions about originality. Charli XCX has faced plagiarism claims over tracks on her Wuthering Heights album. While such claims are common in the music industry and often overstated, they point to a broader concern: how much of Charli XCX’s work is genuinely innovative, and how much is a repackaging of existing sounds and styles? Her defenders would argue that she synthesises and transforms; her critics might argue that she appropriates and commercialises. The truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere in between, but the balance tips further toward appropriation than her champions would like to admit.