The Stunning Transformation Of Charli XCX

It's probably not hyperbole to state that after Charli XCX released her sixth studio album, "Brat," in the summer of 2024, the world changed. We all ditched our Barbiecore pinks for Brat Summer lime greens. We all became "so Julia." We hit the clubs and waited for them to play a few classics. Even Vice President Kamala Harris got in on the action. But while 2024 might have been the first year that Charli XCX went stratospheric (thanks, of course, to the viral success of "Brat"), it was hardly the singer and songwriter's first foray into the music industry.

In fact, Charli XCX, born Charlotte Emma Aitchison, has been making music since she was a teenager growing up in Essex on the outskirts of London. From MySpace demos, to rave DJing, to a record deal at 16, to a successful writing career, to her meteoric internet fame, the musician has already had quite the career. And by the sounds of things, it's still only just beginning. Here's her journey from Essex "nerd" to Brat sensation.

Charli XCX was born in Cambridge on August 2, 1992 as Charlotte Emma Aitchison. Her father, Jon, is of Scottish origin, and her mother, Shameera, is Indian. "She grew up in Uganda and so that's like a big part of my heritage and my life, too," she told BBC Radio. Her mother had been "kicked out" of Uganda in the '70s, after which she and her family moved to the U.K. "She's really kind of been such a big influence on me," said Charli, adding, "She's a real inspiration."

The artist grew up in Hertfordshire, near Essex, on the outskirts of London. From a young age, her interests were firmly in music. In fact, one of her first obsessions was the Spice Girls. "In 1999, I was a little loser, nerd kid running around trying to pretend to be Baby Spice," she recalled to the The Standard. "I was not very cool. I imagine most young girls now are really cool and in touch, but I was not." Honestly, it sounds like she was a total brat (in the best possible way) from the very beginning.

When Charli XCX was just a teenager, she started using her MySpace page as a place to find new music and share some music of her own. "I was 14, staring at MySpace and wishing I had a cooler life," she told Beatroute in 2021. It seems that Charli's desire to be cool really was what spurred her to make music. In another interview with SBS The Feed, she echoed the same feeling. "I was just a nerd," she said of her younger self, adding, "I think the reason I wanted to start writing music is 'cause I thought it would make me cool, and then I realized that it wouldn't. I just wanted to like express myself in as many ways as possible."

Her MySpace page ended up playing a key role in her music career. Not only did it give her an early platform, it also gave her her stage name; "Charli XCX" was the username she had chosen for the account.

Soon enough, Charli XCX was meeting people in the music industry online. When she was asked to perform her music at an illegal warehouse rave in London, her parents were wary, yet supportive. In fact, they both came with her as chaperones — even though her mother was "terrified."

"She grew up in Uganda and never really drank, never smoked a cigarette," Charli recalled to GQ. "She came from a Muslim family where the idea of a 14-year-old going to a rave was completely alien." Her father, on the other hand, had previously worked in live concerts and was secretly excited to be around the music scene again. Proving her independence, for a short time, Charli intended to move out of her parents' house to live with a guy she met on MySpace who was an illegal rave promoter. When she decided to keep living at home but still perform at these raves, her parents could only approve of the plan and continue to accompany her.

"I was very much alone in my musical journey when I was younger," Charli recalled of her early rave performances to Beatroute. "All my friends were at school while I was going to raves — with my parents, which wasn't very cool but whatever." Eventually, Charli's parents began to respect their daughter's DJing career. "As I did more of them, [they] got it," she said to GQ.

Everything changed for Charli XCX when she was 16. After two years of DJing at raves and releasing her own demos on MySpace, the young musician agreed to a five record deal with Atlantic Records. The deal left her with ownership of about 15% of her work. Years later, Charli reflected on Taylor Swift's re-recording of albums and her battle for complete ownership of her masters. "I've been in a position for a long period where I didn't own a lot of the music that I made, so it's hard for me to see that word [masters] being weaponized when it's not the case," she explained to The Face, adding that her record deal with Atlantic was the norm in the industry at the time.

Back then, Charli was more than happy to sign away the majority of her music to the record label — in fact, it felt like a dream come true. "When I got signed, I was like 'Cool, I'm going to be Britney [Spears],'" she told Rolling Stone, explaining that she had expected instant, giant pop stardom at a young age, like Britney Spears had. What followed was a steep learning curve about the realities of the industry.

"I didn't understand the process of becoming an artist, writing songs and developing your sound," she furthered. "I learned so much so quickly, and I think I'm a completely different artist now than when I signed my deal."

While getting a record deal was a major achievement for Charli XCX's burgeoning career, discovering herself as a person and artist didn't happen quickly or smoothly. "I was still in school, I'd just come out of this weird rave scene, and I wasn't really sure what to make of that. And when I got signed I hated pop music; I wanted to make bad rap music," she told The Guardian. "I didn't know who I was. I didn't know what I liked."

Her label sent her to write songs in Los Angeles, where she met fellow songwriter Ariel Rechtshaid in 2010. Suddenly, everything seemed to fall into place. "We only had two hours together and in that time we wrote [Charli's 2011 single] 'Stay Away.' I was freaking out: I had found a piece of myself in this crazy world where people are trying to drag you apart and make you into something," she noted. "That's when things started to come together." By 2013, Charli had released her debut album, "True Romance," and popped off on the dance charts by appearing and writing on the 2012 Icona Pop song, "I Love t."

Alongside her rising singing career, Charli XCX was also very busy writing songs for other artists. She penned Australian rapper Iggy Azalea's "Beg for It" and "Fancy" in 2014, singer Selena Gomez's "Same Old Love" in 2015, and Blondie's "Tonight" in 2017 to name just a few. As the artist explained to Vulture that year, she and her team were constantly looking for new opportunities to write pop music. "I'm always pitching," she emphasized.

In some ways, writing was where Charli felt most comfortable. "Sometimes I wonder: Should I just not be an artist and be a songwriter? It's a constant conversation that's going on in my head," she noted. "I feel most comfortable in the studio. You don't have to put makeup on, you don't have to dress up, or think or care about what anyone thinks of you." Nevertheless, Charli kept on performing and even started keeping more of her songs for herself.

As Charli XCX's career continued, her attitude towards her music started to shift. For her second studio album, 2014's "Sucker," the sound leaned more into pure pop with electronic elements sprinkled throughout. One of the project's songs, "Boom Clap," reached No. 1 on the Billboard Pop Songs radio airplay chart (her first solo song to do so, after "Fancy" with Iggy Azalea) and was featured on the soundtrack for the film adaptation of "The Fault in Our Stars."

Over time, Charli began to care less and less about being successful and more and more about making music she actually liked. "I was very proud of what I was releasing, but it wasn't the music I wanted to put on and listen to in my free time," she told Glamour in 2019, reflecting on her first two albums. "This wasn't the music that I wanted to go to a club and hear."

Eventually, she realized that maybe, commercial success wasn't as important she once thought. "I used to be quite obsessive about, like, 'Am I going to be commercially successful? Am I going to be on the charts?'" she recalled. "I used to care about it, and now I just don't. I think that's what allows me to be quite liberated when I make music."

Pretty much as soon as she released her first album in 2013, Charli realized she was practically addicted to work. "Most of the time if I have days off, I'll cry, because it feels so weird and I don't really know what to do," she confessed to Vice in 2013. "If I have downtime, I always freak out and have a nervous breakdown." But Charli wasn't keen on slowing down. Just one year later, she released "Sucker," then came her mixtapes, "Number 1 Angel" and "Pop 2," in 2017. By 2019, alongside the release of her third studio album, "Charli," the artist was opening interviews with phrases like, "I need a day off."

It wasn't until 2023 that the singer really started trying to carve out time for herself. Speaking to Gayletter, she explained that she was "definitely better" at "enjoying doing nothing" than she used to be. "But," she added, "I wouldn't be myself without creating and making music and being in the studio. I'd be empty and hollow. So, you know, even though I am addicted to what I do, and it borderlines on unhealthy, I feel like I should just be doing what makes me feel alive, and what makes me feel alive is making music and partying and then going back and making music about the parties ... Like that cycle, it just builds a lot of inspiration for me."

After starting her career on the early social media platform MySpace as a teenager, Charli XCX finally began to rethink her relationship with social media as she approached 30 in 2022. Post-COVID-19 pandemic and post-"How I'm Feeling Now," her fourth album that she made in self-isolation, Charli found herself feeling down.

"I have felt really, really low for the majority of this year so far and that's actually unrelated to my career, it's just a general feeling I've been trying to deal with," she said to The Guardian. Naturally, being on social media didn't help. As Charli put it, "When you're feeling low, things that sometimes aren't really very triggering to you suddenly become triggering." She began to find comments harder to handle. Eventually, she decided to take a little break from her accounts. Although the hiatus only lasted about a week, it's clear that Charli started to reconsider her approach to life online and in the public eye as she got older.

After almost a decade of making music, Charli XCX had one of her biggest successes to date with 2022's "Crash." Her fifth studio album was a chart-topping success — becoming her first No. 1 album in the U.K. — that forged new ground for the artist. Focusing the album on the concept of being a pop star, she included tracks that were written by other artists and sampled songs. The music was her attempt of going bigger than she had ever gone before.

"That's not normally something I would do but I was like, 'Okay, if I'm gonna make a major label album, in the major label way, on the last album in my major label deal, then I should probably just do it,'" she said to the BBC. But reaching the end of her five record deal with one of her biggest hits yet was also a little intimidating. "It's still a shock to me — and it's quite stressful because I'm like, 'Oh crap, what do I do now?'" she said. With "Brat" just on the horizon, it seems she quickly decided exactly which lane she wanted to go down.

Charli XCX first met fellow Brit George Daniel – the drummer of the band The 1975 – in 2021 when they worked together on the song, "Spinning" by No Rome, featuring Charli and The 1975. The two reportedly began dating sometime after, and by May 2022, Charli was posting photos of them vacationing together.

The pair also continued to work together. "Now that I'm in a relationship with another musician he's influenced me a lot with his process and how he and his band work," Charli explained to The Sun in 2023. "It's really different to how I work and that has definitely influenced me and my process. I used to be very, 'Quick, quick, quick, album a month, let's go.' Now I'm like, 'Oh, maybe it's cool to take some time and live in the music that you create.' My process is definitely evolving."

The couple announced their engagement in November 2023 in a since-deleted Instagram post (via People) that showed Charli rocking an engagement ring. She captioned the post, "charli xcx and george daniel f***ing for life!!!"

In 2024, Charli XCX suddenly shot to new levels of fame with the release of her sixth album, "Brat," also released with Atlantic. "It's kind of bitchy and gossipy and hardcore and very club feeling," she said to NME when the project was released. "It's definitely one for the girls who like to party and sweat and rave." She added, "I really do feel like this is my best music [yet]."

The album soon went viral as the inspiration behind the phenomenon "Brat Summer," which saw people embracing a hedonistic, feral, club-centric lifestyle as seemingly promoted by the album. The lime green featured on the cover of the album was even dubbed the color of the summer. As Charli later joked to Billboard, "Now I swear this green is just everywhere." The fact that "Brat" especially resonated with listeners was proven by the fact it debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, her highest placement yet.

For Charli, the album was her most honest work to date. "This is the most unabashedly, unapologetically Charli yet," said Brandon Creed, part of her management team. "It is a paradigm shift for her and, in some ways, for the industry."

After the wild success of "Brat," most people would probably expect Charli XCX to dive headfirst into making more music. But that might not actually be the singer's plan. "I saw this tweet the other day that was like, 'Does anyone think that this is Charli's last album?' ... Then I was like, 'Actually, that could be cool if I didn't really make music anymore after this,'" she mused to Billboard.

After "Brat," Charli seems more interested in film than in music. "I really want to act," she noted to the publication. In fact, she planned on heading to Poland to write her first film, and naturally, the process will be done in Charli's own unique artistic way. "We would write it and shoot it at the same time, kind of like making an album," she explained of her plan. "One of the guys is the director — he works that way all the time."

Whatever Charli does next, it's bound to be bigger, brattier, and more internet-breaking, than ever. And we can't wait to see it.