The 12:35pm Metro-North to Beacon was the brattiest train I’ve ever seen in my life. It was jam-packed with twentysomethings in fishnets and jangly jewelry, neon-dyed hair and all-pink tracksuits, crop tops and tall dark boots. Chartreuse-green everything. A group of friends chatted about their plans to go to an FKA twigs–themed rave night. Others compared the best Brooklyn bars for Hinge dates. “Do we know if Caroline Calloway is still alive?” someone in the row behind me asked, sounding genuinely concerned.
Reporters and label heads, TikTokers and art-park lovers, the unemployed—we were all here on a Thursday afternoon to visit Storm King Art Center, an open-air sculpture museum in New York’s Hudson Valley. The event: a last-minute show by Charli XCX. She was set to unveil her new remix album for BRAT, which is loaded with friends and fellow weirdos, from Ariana Grande to Bon Iver to Bb trickz to Bladee. BRAT is among the blockbuster albums of the year: critically raved about across the board, played at probably every cafe and party for months straight, flipped into a political rallying cry for Kamala Harris’ campaign. We should be sick of it by now, but it’s hard to resist when Charli keeps hurling stacked remixes and cheeky tricks like this Storm King one-off.
After reaching Beacon, shuttle buses transported us to the edge of the park. Walking in large clumps through a winding path of fall foliage, it felt like we were on a school field trip. The center of Storm King was like one of those Christmas village sets, except themed after BRAT: chartreuse-green cocktails, beverage stands with “Vitamin Water is BRAT” signs, and a two-sided wooden wall structure that looked like a huge version of a green folder you’d use in middle school science class. It listed every BRAT song along with the remix features and was so tall it seemed to dwarf Alice Aycock’s whirling, 29-foot Three-Fold Manifestation sculpture nearby.
When a dark van pulled up and Charli popped out, the 400 or so people crammed up the slope around the BRAT structure went berserk. There was no real stage or much of a setup beyond speakers, so she stood inside the structure, switching tracks through her phone like we were all huddled listening to a friend control the aux at a house party. “How motherfucking sick is this?” she beamed, swaggering in a fur coat and denim. “We’re fine-art bitches now.” Before starting, she took a moment to address how the remix album leaked with some classic Charli cheek: “I know that no one here listened to the leak. So, if you’re fucking singing the words, I’ll know!” Everyone cheered, and she hit play. With the Storm King event in mind, here are five takeaways from Charli XCX’s Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat.
