News just in: Charli XCX is a minxish, ballsy, lurid boss girl who knows what she’s doing. And that is making catchy, rowdy girl-gang pop songs for girls: party-focused but nobody’s victim.
Sure, the title track of Sucker, her second major label album, consists entirely of F-bombs and randomised attitude. Dig a little deeper, though, and it’s a declaration of breakout UK pop dynamo Charlotte Aitchison’s songwriting prowess, a taunt at those who didn’t believe a young, middle-class woman from Hertfordshire could be an international hit merchant.
Track two, the drongoid chartbait single Break the Rules, also appears to have an IQ in the negative range. “I don’t wanna go to school, I just wanna break the rules,” chants Aitchison, while a standard EDM build-and-drop whips up the ante. There are, though, little 90s grunge guitar motifs tucked into the knowing party anthemics, and the video, in which pink paint is poured over XCX’s gate-crasher prom queen, pays tribute to Stephen King’s Carrie.
Beyond this brattiness, songs like London Queen begin to extend Charli XCX’s appeal. A laptop take on pop-punk, Aitchison is all “Oi!”s, melody and transatlantic observations on her own good fortune. She inserts the word “wank” just to see if it’ll wash in the US. Further in are precision-lasered songs about money and love, having fun and self-pleasure. She doesn’t need you, sneers the new-wave relic, Body of My Own, she can do it better herself. Crucially, beyond bigging herself up on Sucker, Charli XCX doesn’t act the queen bee: she’s a girl’s girl, inclusive, making her collaborations and videos mini riots in which women enjoy each others’ company (at the expense of “the rules”) instead of doing each other down. Here, Famous even has more than a little of Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun about it.
So Aitchison has chutzpah to burn. Strangely enough, though, for all its – and her – charms, Sucker already feels like fairly old news. Last December this album reached number 28 in the US Billboard charts: a solid but disappointing showing, given the ramp-up. Sucker’s breakout single, Boom Clap, was one of the highlights of 2014, alongside the blazing comet that was Fancy, a collaboration with Iggy Azalea that stayed at the top of the US charts for seven weeks. In 2012, Charli XCX’ s song I Love It was an international hit for Icona Pop.
Thanks to the exigencies of marketing Sucker in the States first, Charlotte Aitchison’s home country has been left dangling without an official album release until now. It feels as though the narrative has already moved on from Sucker, to where Aitchison – born Stevenage, educated Bishop’s Stortford, latterday “London queen” – will go next. If references scattered across interviews and the internet are to be believed, there are a slew of Aitchison co-writes coming up for pop A-listers – among them Aitchison’s pal Rita Ora, who guests here on Doing It; the much-missed Gwen Stefani; Rihanna, no less; and Britney Spears, XCX’s top fan-girl crush. XCX has also contributed a top line (industry-speak for a melody) to Giorgio Moroder.
For now, though, there is Sucker: a sneery, nagging, chanty, leopardskin-toting, Lolita-nodding take on several kinds of pop that, despite its dissemination, warrants praise and affection on its home soil debut.
