'Left me stunningly bored': Brat, by Charli XCX, reviewed

Grade: C

I don’t doubt the ingenuity. The mastery of a technology which now exists as a substitute for melody, heart, soul, rhythm and meaning. I get the manifesto, too – a pop music that in a certain shallow sense reflects the modern predilection for meta-fiction: novels which mash up all the genres, so that your detective story suddenly becomes magic realism and a little later, sci-fi.

I understand, too, that this is probably the closest our Gen Zers have to a music which they can call their own, given that the technology required to produce it would cause an embolism in a Gen X listener or a Boomer. So I get all that. The trouble is, what if, when all is said and done, it’s basically rubbish? What if it’s essentially just run of the mill modern EDM with a wholly unwanted nod to that most awful (musically) of decades, the 1980s? Lots of autotune, a wash of synths, the usual synthetic beats, 12 producers and a reasonably agreeable ‘f-you’ attitude: hyperpop, then, with Charli XCX’s longtime muse, AG Cook, overseeing the whole thing. This means, of course, the frequent use of strident repetition. Occasionally this works to jolt the listener. Or often it just annoys.

I was taken for a moment by the opener, ‘360’, which is a cute modern pop song – and reawakened about 15 minutes later by the rather beautifully languid ‘I Might Say Something Stupid’.

But the rest left me so stunningly bored I began to gnaw at my wrist and, hours later, the bitemarks are still visible. Charli maintains on ‘360’ that she doesn’t care one jot what people think of her, and I don’t doubt that for a second. But will anyone remember any of this synthetic dross? I really don’t think so.