Shiny pop perfection, with a touch of grime
Pop 2 Charli XCX (Asylum)
Charli XCX recently caused a Twitterstorm when she tweeted the seemingly innocuous
“I think I’m underrated”, garnering about 40,000 likes and thousands of (mostly supportive) responses.
XCX seemed destined for big things when she co-wrote and performed on Icona Pop’s 2012 smash I Love It, and even more certain to break out after performing the same role on Iggy Azalea’s 2014 hit Fancy. Somehow, though, she has kept on bubbling just under the radar, while the likes of Azalea have hit the stratosphere. Pop
2 could well be the record that changes that.
It is, as the name implies, pure pop, yet at the same time somehow manages to be the exact opposite of everything that is popular music in 2018, pulling in influences from grime, dubstep, breaks and glitch-hop, and polishing them into a heavily vocodered new product with the help of PC Music’s AG Cook’s onpoint production.
It is an album of contradictions, for sure. That constant vocoder, for example, should by rights place it firmly in the chirpy, cheesy pop category championed by Cher’s Believe in 1998 and overused by R&B producers ever since. Instead, here it somehow adds to the sense of isolation that XCX seems to feel. This is the sound of a woman still living the one long party she began when she started performing at London raves age 14, but who has now realised the ultimate pointlessness of it all.
XCX’s polar choice of collaborators on the album offers further, eminently listenable, contradiction. Carly Rae Jepson drops in straight out of the Billboard Top 10 for dreamy opener Backseat, but at the other end of the spectrum we find extravagant Brazilian performer Pabllo Vittar, Estonian MC Tommy Cash and Finnish goth popster Alma. The album is part-bubblegum, part-tour of the hippest artists from the global underground, and undoubtedly XCX’s most accomplished work to date – any album that can take the main refrain from Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major and shape it into a despairing pop ballad, as XCX does on Lucky, gets a gold star.