The Most Honest Thing She's Done Is Lie: Charli XCX Isn’t A Bad Girl Anymore
Words by Matt Keenan
When you think of Brat, I’m sure you think of the cultural moment that was Brat summer. Charli XCX’s Brat was a record for those who stayed out partying too late and then felt bad about it the next morning, only to do it again the next night. It felt like ordering another round of shots for your friends after you already had three, the chaos and cigarettes weren’t just props, they were honest and exciting.
Photo Courtesy of Charli XCX
Transitioning from this raucous moment to “Wink Wink”, which opens with Charli lying in a field eating strawberries under a grey English sky, it feels almost unsettling. What makes it unsettling is dissonance from the last record, Charli almost looks settled. The peaceful nature doesn’t feel like a very brat summer or what we’ve come to know of Charli's past.
You feel settled, sure, but then she opens her mouth.
It feels almost like a confession in reverse, instead of telling you all the things she’s done wrong and has left behind, she catalogs them with an almost cheeky sense of clarity indicating she hasn’t left them behind at all. Then the chorus arrives – it’s the truth and I gotta be honest / I’m not a bad girl anymore, I promise – you’ve already prepared yourself for it. Then there it is: wink, wink.
One of my favorite things about Charli XCX is that she makes music with confidence and swagger like she’s got you. She knows she’s got you, and that’s the whole song.
One of the things that caught me on this track is how the production works to sell this reformation of Charli’s image. Co-written with Finn Keane and produced along with A.G. Cook, “Wink Wink” is a genuinely confident departure from Brat’s club-ready hyperpop sound – it’s midtempo, guitar forward, and it almost feels collegiate as if it were something you’d hear through a dorm wall anytime in the 2000’s. This doesn’t make you want to dance but rather lean up against a wall in a hallway and think.
While you’re falling into the lull of this lovingly crafted “trap”, the wink keeps on winking. The maturity and growth explored in the production isn’t an accident, it’s the setup. Charli and A.G. Cook have built a song that sounds like you got your life together only so that the lyrics can undercut it. The tongue in cheek sense here is that the restraint IS the joke. You can’t separate the two.
The music video for “Wink Wink” was directed by longtime collaborator Aidan Zamiri masterfully brings this structure to life visually. Between doing the laundry, washing the windows, writing in a diary, these are all such committed, thorough images of someone who is getting their life together that it feels almost absurdist. Charli mastered this art though, the performance art about the performance being reformed. The video was directed by the same person who made an A24 mockumentary earlier this year, not one person involved in this is confused about what they’re doing.
Photo Credit: Aidan Zamiri
This brings us back to the question the song keeps circling on without ever quite answering: is there some version of Charli that isn’t winking? The Brat era gave you this chaos with self awareness built in, while “Wink Wink” gives you self-awareness so total that it loops all the way back around toward something that almost resembles sincerity. When she sings I’m not a bad girl anymore for the fourth time, the promise has been so undermined that it almost seems paradoxically true, not because she’s changed, but because the joke has worn thin enough that something real is coming through.
It’s easy to wonder though if that’s what she wants you to think. The wink makes it hard to tell, and Charli’s mastered the art of throwing you for a dupe throughout her music, she’s got you and she knows it. That is the point of a wink after all. Music, Fashion, Film arrives July 24th, and if “Wink Wink” is the final piece of the pre-album rollout, then the picture it completes is of an artist who has figured out how to use irony as a form of vulnerability, or how to mean something while explicitly signaling that you might not mean it after all.
For the moment, Charli is lying in a field eating strawberries, promising she’s changed.
Wink, wink.