Charli XCX's new album Golf club It is not for the faint of heart. Don't be fooled by the commercial-leaning pastiche of Charli's latest album. Crashwhich was arguably their most accessible album since their 2013 debut, true romance. No, that Charli has been run over, maybe on “Speed Drive”, the crazy hyperpop cut of the Barbie soundtrack.
Instead of Golf club, Charli XCX gets her hands dirty. She goes back so far to the Vroom Vroom, Angel number 1, and pop 2 eras of Charli while also leaning into the neon-soaked hedonism of late-aughts turbo pop. Those mixtapes she made with SOPHIE, AG Cook and Easyfun were not only influential to the broader avant-pop movement, but clearly have significance for Charli herself. She has brought back the last two producers for multiple tracks, along with her fiancé George Daniel. Golf club It aims to be both Red Bull and vodka.
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Charli XCX dedicated Crash to the late producer SOPHIE, with whom he made numerous songs until his death in 2020. But Golf club sounds more indebted to SOPHIE's work than its predecessor, and that doesn't just include the beautiful, heartfelt dedication of “So I.” There are plenty of post-pop style choices, moments of abrasiveness and dissonance, and cutting hi-fi production, informed by the bombastic late-2000s sound that Charli has often sunk her teeth into.
“Von dutch” is like a clipped blog from 12 years ago that was thrown into a vat of radioactive sludge. The notable “Mean Girls” is all David Guetta-style turbo pop until the second chorus, where Charli isolates just a jazz piano and builds the beat from there. A song appropriately dedicated to “the mean girls” that contains one of the album's silliest and most dramatic detours, it's exactly the kind of strange dichotomy Charli wants to harness: tension and release, progression and subversion.
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