Pop's reigning bad girl, Charli XCX, has declared herself a bratty brat.

The British hyperpop phenom is more brash and confrontational than ever on her sixth studio album, Brat (released June 7 on Atlantic Records). She laments how she is everyone's "favorite reference" and questions why she can't be more famous ("360"), while also reminiscing about a time when she didn't value fame so much ("Rewind"). She eschews elegance, analyzes the complexity of female relationships ("Girl, so confusing"), and criticizes expectations of women ("Mean girls," "Sympathy is a knife"). Most importantly, she confronts herself and the awkward girl role she has played and has been assigned ("I might say something stupid"). At the club-lit rave she becomes the center of the party, and on the quiet ride home she can't help but take an attitude toward the world and her own perception of who she is and her own desires. So she becomes a bratty general, taking it all in, and doing things differently than anyone else in her peer group or beyond.

The narrative surrounding Charli XCX's career is that she never breaks into the mainstream, but only because she is always ten steps ahead. Her fans have always found her more interesting that way, and she seems to prefer making experimental music for the queer, indiehead fan base known as the Angels rather than creating pop anthems for the masses, more than a decade after her debut with 2013's True Romance. Brat, now at the height of her career, seems to be leaning toward a bad-girl attitude.

Charli XCX occupies a Bad Girl space that hasn't been filled in the pop world for some time. Just as bubblegum has led the charts, so have boundary pushers. Madonna has made a career out of controversy, sex positivity, and elevating the status of the LGBTQ+ community. Y2K pop princesses like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera flirted with dirtiness as much as cuteness. Miley Cyrus emerged like a wrecking ball in the hedonistic "bangers" era. In the mainstream today, Olivia Rodrigo is a champion of youthful rebellion, pushing back against the expectation that women must be "good" and polite, yet approachable. Lana Del Rey may come closest, as she debuted as the self-proclaimed "Nancy Sinatra of the gang" and plays with the American iconography of the counterculture throughout her work. But bad girls have now almost infiltrated the hip-hop world, with fierce ladies like Cardi B, Sexy Red, and Dodger Cat leading the genre. These days, pop itself is dominated by notions of intimacy and safety.

God forbid, though, that some people crave for the culture bearers to be untouchable and effortlessly cool; throughout Brat's album cycle, she (whose real name is Charlotte Aitchison) has playfully emphasized that she is the It Girl She has playfully emphasized that she is the It Girl. She released a music video for her single "360," called "Cool Girl Summit," starring famous friends like Gabriette, Julia Fox, and Rachel Sennott. IYKYK also hosted numerous pop-up events at scene-defining electronic music spaces such as The Lot Radio and Boiler Room in Brooklyn, where thousands of fans rushed in or announced their participation with only a few hours' notice.

While many stars can have such pulling power in holding last-minute events, they rarely meet fans in the spaces they occupy and create a sense of exclusivity. Charli XCX has reached a new level of fame, with her first co-headlining stadium tour with Troye Sivan later this year, but she remains true to the underground nightlife world she grew up in and loves being a part of it! She was on the dance floor with fans, grinding to the beat and signing poppers, confirming that those on the list were fans from her early days.

The Brat era began when Charli XCX opened a private Instagram (@360_brat) where she posted song previews and held candid Q&As with fans, giving candid opinions about other artists, their albums, the music industry, and her personal life. For a time, she only accepted requests from a few thousand fans at a time, which she felt was a bold and no-frills move in an era of highly curated celebrity social media. The page now has over 150,000 followers, and she uses it to post tips about pop-ups before publicly announcing them (and by then the list is often closed).

@360_brat AMA's candor is reflected in Charli XCX's albums in many ways, including her ability to not be afraid to explore the dynamics of female friendships, frenemies, or acquaintances you may or may not envy. For a long time, pop music has been an uplifting advocate for female friendship and empowerment, a worthy and necessary cause, but it often feels distorted when fandoms assume that criticism of the artists they support is a misogynistic attack. In "Brat," however, Charli XCX openly expresses her feelings of inferiority in the face of certain women, despite her unmistakable "it girl" element. It may be controversial, but it feels more nuanced and real than some pop branded as familiar. Perhaps this outpouring of her complex emotions is an opening for feminism in current pop culture to more comfortably discuss women's complex relationships and insecurities.

On the sound front, Brat (which features longtime Shari X.C.X. collaborator A.G. Cook as lead producer) is a return to the London techno scene where she released music on MySpace as a teenager. Aside from a few punchy singles ("Von Dutch," "360"), there are few songs with bumping drum beats and electro-clash synthesizers that have any radio appeal. Even the album cover resembles the lo-fi rave flyers of yesteryear. Some have criticized the concept, but while many image-conscious stars have not commented on the matter, Sherri has defended it with class and confidence. Both on social media and in interviews, she responded to the public's excessive demand to see and commodify the female body. Nowadays, the cover is a meme and every green section looks like a guerilla blat advertisement. As always, she believed in her own sense of style, cool and bad, and she was right. [If the mainstream doesn't embrace her in real time, she will lean harder, as she always has - knowing that other artists are copying her style and trying to emulate her sound ("Von dutch", "The 360 remix with robyn and yung lean"). Still, she's bigger than ever (she had the biggest streaming debut on Spotify with Brat), and it's thrilling that someone who is such a proud and fearless trendsetter has spent so many years moving so close to the top and creating something truly defining That's the thing. In the lead single, Charli says it best: she's a cult favorite, but she's still bouncing.