Charli XCX

I assumed this album was going to be similar to the Charli era where she had obvious attempts at hits (1999, Blame It On Your Love and Gone) but then kept the weirder or more avant garde music (as Charli puts it) for the album. I ended up really loving Good Ones, but these two last singles have been her weakest in a long time. New Shapes is so flat and underwhelming considering the talent involved. I'm still looking forward to the album as she hasn't really missed yet (sorry Charli, Sucker is great) but compared to the last few albums, my enthusiasm isn't on the same level.

charli's "please help me game the system" schtick is a bit offputting, especially hand in hand with the shift into tawny kitaen fashion as a fairly obvious stab at attention getting

is she confused.... or iconic?

I know Charli isn’t in the boards good books right now, but I’ve quite enjoyed a lot about the recent singles, Baby in particular was one I knew I would like from the dlips posted months ago and almost lived up to my very high expectations. I’m a huge fan of stuff influenced by 80s pop so the stuff mining that period hits a sweet spot for me.

I saw the album has leaked now and it all hangs together well as a collection to me although maybe there’s a drop off towards the end. Of the new tracks Constant Repeat is maybe the most immediate new one on there and sounds like a potential future single. Lightning has a turbo-freestyle feel to it which I enjoyed. There’s maybe some overconfidence in stealing a lot from the Stonebridge remix of Robin S - Show Me Love on Used to Know Me which I don’t think quite pulls it off. Twice is a pleasant enough album closer, but I could do with something a little more daring at the end,

Overall, it’s a polished album and I’ll enjoy listening to it this year, but I’ll be hoping for more next time around.

I don’t care for the singles but I have tickets to the London gig and know it’s gonna be a fun time even if I don’t care for the new stuff. She’s always been hit & miss.

I’m going to start backtracking, this album is worming itself deeper into my brain the more I listen to it.

it's better than i expected from the lead-up, it's solid enough but still not really exciting or anything. at the very least "lightning" and the title track are quite cool

p4k claiming it's better than how i'm feeling now is totally ridiculous though lol

but there's still the feeling of it being a bit slight overall and she should be largely capable of better, even if she wanted to make something more conventional. she very rarely gives the ideas room to breathe even when they're good ones - that's why "lightning" is the best track

I’m a big fan of the classic ~30 minute pop album length and this nails that. I just wish the extended 12" mix of pop tracks would come back.

word

i think that’s one reason i like “rock Charli” - the songs feel loosey-goosey

I wanted to play Baby on my radio show but needed to take the fucks out, so I did do a quick and dirty re-edit and ended up extending it a bit. It’s starts around the 1 hour 33 minute mark if anyone is interested: https://soundcloud.com/1btn/inter-mission-11032022 (warning I had a couple too many beers before the show and you can tell). I would like to try and get into the habit of making some 80s style extended mixes of current pop tracks.

need to confirm you introduced it with "it's Charli, Baby"?

Lot going on here for a short album. Nice.

xp when you made that joke I was immediately reminded of how forlorn and emotional Pop 2 is, what a record. “Track 10” feels like the last message from a doomed human race if I play it late at night. It’s woven into such a specific time with my daughters, will always be my favourite.

Maffew12 I definitely missed a trick there.

Definitely more enjoyable in the album sequence than as a bunch of pre-release singles.

Favorites are Constant Repeat and the juxtaposition of Every Rule and Yuck.

Oh besides the new Rosalia, I also surprisingly like this one more than I anticipated.

Wait, why am I suddenly agreeing with p4k scores? I need to take a step back.

This album is in isolation fine. Its major flaw is HIFN's existence

It is perhaps SLIGHTLY better than I feared it'd be

it's obviously not anywhere near as good as pop 2 or how i'm feeling now but it is better than charli which i wasn't really expecting

I really like this. The singles I didn't rate before sound great to me now. As you say, ufo it's maybe not on the same level as her very best but I still like it a lot. All of her albums/mixtapes are good to great.

it's obviously not anywhere near as good as pop 2 or how i'm feeling now but it is better than charli which i wasn't really expecting

― ufo, Saturday, 19 March 2022 23:15 (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, kinda where i'm at

i still think "good ones" is pretty meh but it's not actively bad so it doesn't drag down the album or anything. same with "new shapes", it's only mediocre, not bad enough to skip it.

i really wish "crash" and "twice" were longer because they're really good but so short (& "twice" is one of the longest tracks here!). "twice" would be perfect if it just went for it at the end, it just needs more catharsis. and "crash" is just excellent new jack swing, two minutes is nowhere near enough. if the whole album was as good as those (& "lightning") then it would have totally succeeded at what she was going for (except maybe at delivering her a hit? lol)

Gotta say every collab with Christine and the Queens sounds forced and lifeless to me.

Gone is a banger! Reminds me of this amazing moment at Brixton Academy a couple of years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALv5EnaXZbY

I have to admit Gone is pretty good

crash deluxe is out today with 4 new tracks and they're all quite good and better than a lot of the album lol

especially "how can i not know what i need right now"

I am looking forward to hearing this album

Banger out the gate

it's great and "twice" to me is amongst her best ever tracks. i'm hearing also that it's possible she could hit #1 in the UK and Australia this week which would be a real coup.

per upthread it's a pleasant surprise this has turned out better than Charli. I've played it a dozen times no skips. Only heard about the 4 more songs coming today. i guess i can hear them shortly if i stay awake

*"Charli", the album

it's great and "twice" to me is amongst her best ever tracks. i'm hearing also that it's possible she could hit #1 in the UK and Australia this week which would be a real coup.

― monotony

Yeah, she's looking good for number one in the UK now. It seems very unexpected. I'm really happy for her.

even if she doesn't make #1 it should be her best charting album by a fair way at the very least

which is pretty confusing - sure the label is actually putting resources into promotion this time (unlike hifn & the mixtapes) but it certainly doesn't feel like the singles have even had as much traction as the charli singles or anything. it's apparently being driven nearly entirely by physical sales, but has her core fanbase really increased that much/gotten that much more dedicated that much since charli?

glad that it's very much a success for her

like, maybe hifn was enough of a cult hit to really expand her fanbase and drive physical sales for this? but weird & hard to get a grasp on

Yeah, it doesn't really make sense. Charli only reached number 14 and had opening sales of less than 5,000. That seemed to have just as much of a push as Crash and contained Gone and 1999 which were about as big as Good Ones and Beg For You (the biggest hits from this era). How I'm Feeling Now didn't do that well on physical sales when it came out even though it seemed to be a much more popular album with her fans and I guess, the internet.

I guess this is the era where everything finally aligned. She came close with Sucker but wasn't there at least one delay and an earlier release in the US? It's so weird to me that album is seen as the black sheep of her back catalogue now.

sucker got delayed from early october to mid december in the us, and all the way to february in europe (to add a few more tracks & add rita ora to "doing it" to try to get another hit out of it). it did ok but seems like classic label mismanagement, she had real traction and reasonably big hits with "boom clap", "break the rules" and "fancy", but then in the four months between "break the rules" and the album's us release they only released a few promo singles that they barely gave a push at all. even the successful "doing it" remix in the lead up to the uk release didn't seem to help that much, & they didn't bother to give it a us push at all.

but it's also just not a very good album, "doing it" is the only track i have any lasting fondness for.

The UK album chart also works fairly differently to when Sucker came out. The streaming focus is part of an even faster turnaround and bigger focus on the new, and that helps more acts to reach #1 once they are above a certain level, at least for a week. Adele and Olivia Rodrigo were the only albums to spend more than one week in a row at #1 last year.

yeah obviously the more direct comparison is with charli, both for charts methodology & point-in-her-career reasons.

aus #1 confirmed now

the added tracks... are not up to the rest!

remember she was talking 2 more albums coming soon after HIFN?

anyway glad she can make some deals with leverage now

UK #1. we did it angels!

really like this album

baby and beg for you both great

UK #1. we did it angels!

― maf you one two (maffew12)

I feel a bit emotional seeing this. It's so well deserved. She's been so consistently brilliant for almost ten years now.

the way the spanish guitar is deployed in "lightning" has real "getting away with it" vibes, probably why i've taken to it so much

Charli XCX on Her Best, Hardest, and Most Mainstream Music

“It’s like, the second I started saying ‘main pop girl’ online, everyone was coming for me,” Charli says. “I was like, ‘Do you know who you stan? Obviously I’m going to deliver you something iconic. Don’t doubt me.’”

no i think it's just because the early singles weren't great lol. if she'd started the rollout stronger i think the fanbase would have been very onboard from the start but as it was "good ones" was slight & perfunctory and wasn't really good as a charli track or as a big sell-out pop move

& her constantly getting mad at fans on twitter who were underwhelmed by the album campaign just made them more annoyed lol

good read though

pic.twitter.com/iVduj5p8ko

— @FckyeahCharli / Charli XCX Updates Media (@fckyeahcharliHD) March 27, 2022

this is the sort of trolling of her fans that's good though (playing unreleased tracks she's long-refused to officially release over the pa after her show)

extremely obviously her best since pop 2