Charli XCX will perform at San Francisco’s Rickshaw Stop.
Charli XCX’s finely tuned style quirks — brightly colored lipstick with matching stilettos, glitter and white roses juxtaposed with velvet chokers and coffin emojis — are in line with her skewering of pop music.
In anticipation of her next full-length album, Charli XCX dropped her latest mixtape, “Number 1 Angel.” It’s 10 tracks long, with sleek cover art and tight production, but keep in mind: This is technically a mixtape, even though the definition of a “mixtape” is stretched very thinly over its 37-minute run time.
“To be honest, I don’t really know what the difference is,” she says, with a laugh. “This mixtape in particular — it could be an album, you know? But just by calling it that, everybody kind of just left me alone and let me do what I wanted to do.”
Her third official yet-to-be-titled LP is finished and soon to be released, but eager fans can loop “Number 1 Angel” in the interim. And they shouldn’t be disappointed — the mixtape delivers on her promise of growth and evolution, while staying true to the buzzy, larger-than-life musical style that makes Charli XCX instantly recognizable.
Ever since Charlotte Aitchson adopted her stage name — famously, Charli XCX was an old AOL screen name she reworked into a brash pop brand — and jumped from a suburban life in England into the music business, she’s been no stranger to success as a writer for the stars and a singer and performer.
A young artist more confident than ever in her craft, Charli XCX is a colorful, bold, electrifying figure, and she plans to bring that energy to San Francisco at the Rickshaw Stop on Sunday, April 2. She says that this mini-tour will emphasize all of her new music.
“I’m not going to play old songs, really, I’m just going to play the mixtape songs,” she says. “No ‘After the Afterparty’ or anything, which I’m excited about.”
“Number 1 Angel,” which dropped in early March, is sneaking its way into the Billboard charts, powered by stand-out singles like “3 AM (Pull Up).” The mixtape is packed with looped bass-heavy melodies, swelling, anthemic hooks and dynamic collaborations spanning conventional genre divisions. (These guest spots are all by women, by coincidence but also inadvertently reflecting an emerging trend in pop.) Topped off with vintage-sounding techno turns and the nerve to chop up continually, Auto-Tune and distort Charli XCX’s powerhouse vocals, the mixtape reminds fans that this pop has an edge. It’s one of her more experimental efforts, a welcome development she credits to the mixtape format and her own musical maturity.
“‘Number 1 Angel’ is probably my favorite music that I’ve released,” she says. “It was me just doing my thing, saying what was on my mind, without pressure or intention.”
Pop stardom in 2017 is difficult to define, although, as in Charli XCX’s case, it’s often easy to identify. At 24 years old, she finds putting on a large-scale show coming naturally. Charli XCX’s other gig as “songwriter for hire” has put her in contact with some of the biggest names in the music industry. She had an instrumental role in composing hits like Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” as well as stints writing for a slew of artists including Madeon, James Blunt, Danny Brown and Selena Gomez — all the while figuring out how she could stand out in a space heavily saturated
with top-40-friendly talent.
She began working in her mid-teens and now, three mixtapes and two released albums later, Charli XCX is making the music and creating the pop star persona that she wants.
Charli XCX’s finely tuned style quirks — brightly colored lipstick with matching stilettos, glitter and white roses juxtaposed with velvet chokers and coffin emojis — are well in line with her electronic skewering of pop music as it has existed for the past 20 or so years.
Once dominated by Billboard charts royalty with heavy radio play, pop music has dramatically diffused and diversified as of late. With the advent of streaming, playlists and audiences who can now listen exclusively to the music of their choosing, pop as a genre is in an unprecedented flux.
Charli XCX posits that the idea of a monolithic pop star is a “dying breed of pop.” Like so many others, she is in a position where anything goes, where the more individual and unique the artist, the better.
“I think that pop, throughout my time in the music industry, has become more and more intelligent,” Charli XCX says. “It’s more and more led by the artist, and even sonically more broad, you know, because what even is pop now?”