While one might have assumed Charli XCX would try to milk another single out of Brat for The Moment Soundtrack, what the always surprising “3-D Pop Star” (as Rolling Stone UK billed her in May of ‘24) has come up with instead is enlisting A. G. Cook to score the music for the film. And while some of fans’ Brat favorites (e.g., “365”) might end up on the soundtrack too, what XCX has decided to offer up first is Cook’s mostly instrumental “Dread.” The parts that aren’t instrumental, however, opt to incorporate the same repeated lyrics from the single that truly launched XCX into the mainstream back in 2012, “I Love It.” Even if said song was attributed to Icona Pop (mostly unheard of ever since then) with Charli as a feature. And, although Charli had written the song, she knew pretty much right away that she wasn’t going to keep it for herself. At the time, she stated this was because the song was the “wrong color.” A nod to her little discussed (at least in comparison to Lorde and Billie Eilish) superpower of synesthesia.
In 2013, she told BBC News that, although she hadn’t “officially” been diagnosed with it, the fact of the matter is, “I see music in colors. I love music that’s black, pink, purple or red—but I hate music that’s green, yellow or brown.” Yes, saying she hates music that’s “green” is a bit ironic now—though she never said she hated music that’s Brat green. In any case, “I Love It” wasn’t a color that worked for her, so she passed it off to Icona Pop while still keeping it close. In other words, not totally aborting it from her musical womb. And now, she seems even more keen to harken back to her “roots” in the sense of alluding to the first moment she technically “blew up” in the music industry.
Indeed, at the time, the success of “I Love It” seemed like it was the biggest Charli could be, with the baby brat also remarking to BBC News, “It was really surreal to have a UK number one, especially when no one really knows who you are.” This referring to the marginal steam that her debut, True Romance, gained, only managing to land on the UK chart at number eighty-five. But after the success of “I Love It” (complete with getting a, er, bump of even more recognition in the U.S. after appearing in a season two episode of Girls called “Bad Friend”), XCX became much more well-known in time for the release of her second album, Sucker. This being perhaps her least loved offering in her discography as, out of all of them, she considers it the most “all over the place,” the least “her.”
Sucker era aversion aside, choosing to revisit “I Love It” through A.G. Cook’s “Dread” is a pointed decision on both Cook and XCX’s part (the two being very “hive mind-y” at this point after so many years spent working together). For it, again, recalls the first time that XCX felt like she had truly hit “the big time,” having no idea what would be in store for her twelve years later, when Brat would truly transform her into the height of “mainstream.” Much to her occasional chagrin, as it’s no secret that XCX has often spoken of the ambivalence she feels about being a Full-Blown Pop Star versus an “outlier” of the music industry. With Brat, there was no denying that XCX could no longer entirely play that coy game.
“Dread” conveys that sense of emotional push and pull to perfection, particularly when, at around the two-minute-five-second mark, the tone of the music goes from “trippily ambient” to fraught and anxiety-inducing. In short, mirroring the trajectory of what occurred with Charli’s escalating rise throughout the Brat rollout. And in the accompanying visualizer, it’s during this tonal shift that the appearance of a gold sequined dress (presumably being worn by Charli) intercut with a close-up shot on the hooks of some hangers on a clothing rack add to the notion that XCX is being pushed into a more “high-gloss” world that she doesn’t necessarily want to be a part of. Still committed to her “on the fringe” life despite, at the same time, having always wanted the validation that comes with this level of success.
Disjointed and ultimately “impressionistic” shots of what seem like totally random scenes from the Brat life are designed to further heighten the feelings of, well, dread that might arise throughout the song. As it starts to come to a close, the music again shifts to a more “peaceful” tone (that is, by Cook’s standards of what constitutes “peaceful”). This as Charli keeps repeating, “I don’t care”—except now it sounds more like, “Is anybody there?” (Allie X has a similar query). A fair question to ask when you get to a certain height of fame and realize that, even though there are thousands of people around you, it can be decidedly lonely and isolating at the top. Not to mention hollow. This being something that XCX touched on in one of her recent Substack posts, “The Realities of Being a Pop Star,” when she said that it’s easy to feel “embarrassed by how stupid the whole thing is.” “The whole thing” being fame and, in her unique case, the life of its own that Brat took on. Something that “Dread” succinctly captures both in the music’s sound and in the apropos choice to repurpose the key phrases of “I Love It” (“I don’t care” and “I love it”) in a manner that makes them have entirely different connotations within this context.
As for the “Dread” visualizer, it also very much encapsulates something else that XCX said in “The Realities of Being a Pop Star,” debunking the myth of the so-called glamorous life by mentioning of what it “means” to be a pop star: “You will also end up spending a lot of time inhabiting strange and soulless liminal spaces. Whether it’s the holding area of the event you’re about to enter, the airport lounge, the visa office, the claustrophobic tour bus, the green room with no windows, the underneath of a stage or the set build of a photoshoot or music video you’re on, you are often caught in the in-between. You’re in transit, you’re going somewhere but the journey itself takes up the majority of the experience.” The same can possibly be said for her Brat experience, which is no doubt part of why she wanted to defibrillate “the moment” in 2026 by revisiting it through this mockumentary and its possibilities for new songs that capture the anxiousness, from XCX’s perspective, of Brat’s ascent.
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