'Brat and it's completely different but also still brat' is Completely Different, but Still Brat

Now that's what I call a remix album.

I gushed earlier this year about the original Brat, and now I'm back to gush about the remix album, fresh off the press. First things first: "Completely Different" is very accurate here. Pop remixes are almost always a little bit disappointing; most of the time, they're the same track with the 2nd verse surgically removed and swapped in with a feature. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is exactly what it is.

This album, though. This is truly a remix album. The changes are so broad and fundamental that it almost feels like a separate follow-up album. It doesn't just rely on simple instrumental changes, either. It's not just an album of DJ remixes. Most of the song structures have been entirely flipped on their heads, barely any verses from the original are left intact, and what few lyrics that do remain have been recontextualised to create entirely new meanings.

Take the remix of 'Sympathy Is A Knife' for example, featuring Ariana Grande (thank you, Troye Sivan). In the original, Charli sings about her angst and feeling inadequate around an unnamed megastar. She'll "never even be her if [she] tried." Things have changed, though; the Charli who wrote 'Sympathy Is A Knife' back then is not the same Charli writing the remix. Here, she's made it. Brat achieved more mainstream and critical success than any of her previous albums. The album created an entire summer's worth of trends on TikTok. She went from being the 'Boom Clap' girl to the eponymous Brat.

Suddenly, 'Sympathy Is A Knife' is flipped on its head. Instead of the driving, jealous angst of the original, the remix somehow takes the same elements and turns them inwards. What comes out is a more reflective track that evokes a slightly different strain of anxiety. Here, it's not the sympathy of the megastar that feels like a knife. It's all the expectations placed on her with the success. It's the pointed questions from journalists, the friends left behind. It's the "sympathy" from strangers who begin to project fictions onto you once you reach a certain level of popularity. And, of course, who better to feature than Ariana Grande, who's no stranger to the knife of bad press.

The album is full of these types of clever choices that add new meaning to the tracks. Including Matty Healy on 'I Might Say Something Stupid' and opening it with "I could say something smart / But might say something stupid" was, I hate to admit it, a great move. Troye on 'Talk Talk' turns it from a track that was as close to cutesy as Charli ever gets,to a horny club banger. Lorde on 'Girl, So Confusing' brings another layer of depth and warmth to the frenemy track. Shygirl on '365' is amazing and makes sense in every imaginable way.

Caroline Polachek's 'Everything Is Romantic' deserves a special shoutout, too. The original painted the everyday as romantic, elevating chipped wooden signs to the same level of beauty as a Mediterranean sunset. The remix is very much not that; Charli's so burnt out that she can't even see the romance in anything anymore. Her vocals take up a small part of the track, framed via a phone call to Caroline. It makes the track more of a confessional, literally giving us a window into a phone call between friends. By the end of it, though, there's a glimpse of that romance again, as though Caroline is speaking it back into Charli's life. That's what friends do, right?

'I Think About It All The Time' with Bon Iver brings out more from Charli. It's very much like when you start talking to a friend about your feelings, and you discover more nuance in your emotions through that conversation.

Of course, the whole album isn't perfect. There are moments that do not land. Robyn's verse on the '360' remix is one that I skip every time. Ariana's "mean fans" lyric is a real dud. Bladee's verses on 'Rewind' feel amateurish compared to the rest of the album. The Julian Casablancas remix of 'Mean Girls' fleshes out an interesting new angle on the song but feels a little undercooked.

But these moments are still interesting. Like the (relative) lows on Charli's Pop 2 mixtape, these moments might not have landed as expected but they're still only there because of how Charli and her collaborators are willing to experiment and take risks. That, and the clever way she plays with the superstructure of the pop music machine (the entire rollout and marketing campaign), really cement her as one of the defining stars of the 2020s.