aCharli XCX has come a long way, despite spending much of her early career outside the mainstream: the British pop star who first gained traction on her MySpace page has gone on to inspire not only the memes of the summer but also a tumultuous transatlantic presidential election.
“I can’t believe Charli XCX is successfully using foreign interference in a US election as an album marketing strategy.” A fan posted this to X After Kamala Harris’ campaign fully embraced the singer’s endorsement.
When Charlie wrote “Kamala is a Brat,” she instantly transformed a mundane politician in a steamy pantsuit into a messy Internet It girl, because as we all know, Brat, inspired by Charlie’s latest album, isn’t just a name, it’s a lifestyle: it’s the excess and rave culture of the 2000s. It was “a pack of cigarettes, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra.”That’s just cool.
The 31-year-old singer has generated countless headlines and trending articles since releasing her sixth studio album in June, but she’s been in the industry for over 15 years. Known among fans for her boundary-pushing, avant-garde pop, she’s long been considered an artist whose “critical acclaim has surpassed commercial success.”
Born Charlotte Emma Acheson in Cambridge in 1992 (raised in Essex), the musician is the only child of Shameela, a nurse and flight attendant, and John Acheson, an entrepreneur and show booker. Her mother was born in Uganda to a Gujarati Indian family and her father is Scottish.
Atchison’s musical journey began at the age of 14. She convinced her parents to give her a loan to record her first album, 14, and began uploading songs from the album to her Myspace page in early 2008. This caught the attention of promoters who invited her to play warehouse raves and parties in East London. Her stage name, Charli xcx, is a reference to her MSN Messenger display name from her youth, and she demonstrated early on her ability to instil her brand into web culture.
This first album remained unreleased, but in 2010 Atchison signed with Asylum, a subsidiary of major record company Atlantic, which launched her career.
Initially, the singer struggled to write songs she was happy with and has since described that period as one in which she was “lost”. In an interview with The Guardian, she said: “I was still at school and had just come out of this weird rave scene and didn’t really know what to do with it. And when I got signed, I hated pop music and wanted to make bad rap music. I didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know what I liked.”
It was after a writing trip to LA and sessions with Haim and Solange collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid that things started to click. Atchison’s first big break came not as a solo artist, but as a writer and collaborator with Swedish duo Icona Pop and their shouty smash hit “I Love It,” which reached No. 1 in the UK in 2013.
This led to demand for a return, and she performed her collaboration with Iggy Azalea on “Fancy”, which became one of the best-selling singles of 2014 and was nominated for two Grammy Awards. She soon followed this up with the song “Boom Clap” for the soundtrack to the film The Fault in Our Stars, which peaked at number six in the UK.
Meanwhile, Atchison’s debut album, True Romance, was released in 2013. Though it was well received by music critics, it failed to meet commercial expectations, leading to burnout and disillusionment with the industry.
Critics described her early work as that of a would-be star steadily staking her claim to fame, but in reality Atchison struggled to make the kind of music she wanted to make—perhaps unsurprising for a woman whose influences were as disparate as Gwen Stefani and The Cure.
She ended up going to Sweden, away from her record company, and spending a month making a punk-inspired album before eventually abandoning it for a more “pop-oriented” album, which she told DIY magazine was meant to give girls a “sense of empowerment.”
The album, Sucker, was officially released in Europe in February 2015 and became a solo success for her, reaching number 15 in the UK Albums Chart. The third single from the album, “Doing It”, featuring fellow British singer Rita Ora, peaked at number 8 in the UK Singles Chart.
Atchison has continued to grow in fame since then, founding the experimental pop record label Vroom Vroom Recordings in 2016 and hosting her own biweekly show on Beats 1. She has since released the albums Charli (2019), How I’m Feeling Now (2020), Crash (2022) and finally Brat (2024). She has collaborated with a host of stars, including Rae, Troye Sivan, MØ, Lizzo and Christine and the Queens.
By the time she played her second Boiler Room concert, titled PARTYGIRL, in Brooklyn in early 2024, Atchison had received approximately 40,000 RSVPs, the most in Boiler Room history. Her concerts featured numerous performances and special appearances, and social media was abuzz with them, attesting to her rapid growth and popularity. Upon release, Brat was met with immediate critical acclaim, ranking in Metacritic’s top 25 highest-rated albums of all time. At this year’s Glastonbury, some fans reported lines “as long as the entrance to Glastonbury” before the Silver Haze Field closed before her DJ set on the Rebels Stage on Friday night.
Lyrically, Atchison’s songs deal with themes such as hedonism and love. Her music has been called dark wave, witch house, gothic pop, synth pop, pop punk and avant-garde pop, but she says she “doesn’t fit myself into a musical genre.”
She’s long expressed her admiration for 1990s pop culture, citing the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Avril Lavigne, and fictional characters Cher Horowitz, Wednesday Addams, and Nancy Downs as inspirations for her own style, which she describes as “’90s schoolgirl.” And now, that schoolgirl is powerful.
