Charli XCX decided not to chase the charts with her new album ‘Brat’.
The 31-year-old singer is gearing up to release her latest L.P. – which will be available on Friday (07.06.24) – and explained that she wanted to stay “true to [her]self” with the album by not tailoring her tracks to become chart-toppers.
During an interview with British GQ, she said: “I’m constantly going back and forth in my conflict around fame and what constitutes success.
“This new music is not going to be played in Starbucks. It’s not going to be played on the Zen Morning playlist.
“It’s pop music and I’m being true to myself.
“But I also know that if I chose a slightly different, maybe more palatable path, I do have the skills as a songwriter to write big Top 40 pop hits.”
The ‘I Love It’ hitmaker added that her fans would know she was being “inauthentic” if she focused on commercial success.
She said: “Sometimes I tempt myself with going there, but I think the problem is my fanbase knows that that’s not who I am, so they kind of smell a rat, and they’re like, ‘This is inauthentic.’
“But I think that sometimes puts me in this position where the masses are like, ‘What the f*** is this?’”
Charli also knows that reaching the top of the charts would not bring her any happiness.
She explained: “I would in no way be as happy, creatively satisfied or, honestly, as good as some of the people who are operating on a hugely commercial level, because maybe I’m just not built for it.”
The ‘Hot Girl’ singer then hit back at the idea modern pop music had to be “full of poetic metaphors” to be authentic, and instead insisted the genre had to be “conversational” – something she wanted to achieve with ‘Brat’.
She said: “We’re in this place where people thought pop music needed to be big and full of poetic metaphors to give it some kind of authenticity, which I don’t think is true at all.
“I wanted to create this world of that 2000’s flip phone, cameras flashing, live fast, die young.
“I wanted my lyrics to be conversational because that’s what I think pop culture actually is: it’s a 15-second TikTok, a selfie in a cloud, a text to your friends being like ‘Where you at, b****?’”
The ‘Heroes Issue’ of British GQ is available via digital download and on newsstands on 11th June.