brat Two Years Later
Tired of being fine
In June 2024, Charli XCX released an album with a cover so ugly it looped back into iconic: the word “brat” in a smeared, condensed font, dropped against a jarring lime-green background. By August, the vice president of the United States was using that same green on her campaign banners. Two years later, Charli made a mockumentary poking fun at the whole thing. That’s the tell. When the person who built the moment starts laughing at it, the moment is officially over….or is it?
A history that contradicts itself
“Brat summer” went viral between June and August 2024: lime-green, chaotic, clubbing-adjacent, a shorthand for being on trend. Charli declared it over that same year, and then released another version of the album, brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, with twenty guest artists including Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, and Troye Sivan. The title already contains the argument this essay is making: it’s over, except it isn’t, except it’s a different thing now, except it’s still brat.
What brat actually gave people
The aesthetic (the green, the lowercase, the deliberately ugly cover) was never really the point. Underneath it was a mood: a slightly manic permission to be messy, sweaty, and unbothered while still being taken seriously. It landed with a generation of women in their mid-twenties who had spent their early twenties performing competence, and it handed them a word for the exhaustion underneath that performance. Brat was never about partying really. It was about admitting you were tired of being fine, and finding out, in real time, that a few million other people were tired of it too. That’s the part that outlasts the aesthetic, a certain the relief of being allowed to say the performance was costing you something.
The mockumentary as eulogy
The Moment, Charli’s mockumentary released earlier this year, is the clearest evidence that brat has entered its afterlife. Cultural phenomena rarely get to narrate their own ending as most fade by attrition, shoved offstage by whatever trend arrives next before anyone can eulogize them properly. Charli did something rarer: she wrote the eulogy herself and cast herself as the punchline. That’s the giveaway. You only send something up once you’re certain it can’t be killed by the joke.
What comes after
Charli’s own answer isn’t more brat. Her next album, due this July, is being described as a rock reinvention, a deliberate turn away from the club sound that made her. That refusal is its own kind of postmortem. Brat’s afterlife won’t be a sequel; it’ll be a reference point, the thing the next mood measures itself against, the way every loud, unbothered thing that follows will still owe it something, even in the act of turning away.
Which is the real shelf life of a cultural mood like this one: not how long people keep repeating the aesthetic, but how long they keep needing the permission it gave them, long after the color’s gone out of style.