The Good, Bad, and Ugly of This Week’s Girlie Pop

Our Songs of the Week column spotlights great new tunes and analyzes notable releases. Find our new favorites and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist, and for other great songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, a flurry of girlie pop collabs offer both unessential and extremely essential bops.

New and Notable:

Girl, Bury That Hatchet!

It’s easy to lose track of some of the Big Ideas™ that Charli XCX imbued into Brat — the neon-soaked, pulsating exterior of its many tracks are meant to bring you to the club before exposing their more vulnerable musings. “Girl, so confusing” strides that line well, though — Charli laments the complicated dynamics she feels with a fellow pop star, attempting to contextualize subtle behaviors and insecurities between the two with the grand thesis that girlhood is so much more knotty and complex than “Girlboss Feminism” would have you believe.

But Charli knew that “Girl, so confusing” was not allowed to live in a vacuum in this pop-as-confession digital age. Of course there’d be an elephant in the room — whether that was in Charli’s personal life or within her fanbase at large. So, there’s something particularly satisfying about Charli recruiting the song’s subject (Lorde) for the remix, essentially qualifying the original statement of “Girl, so confusing” with the idea that yes, Lorde was kind of feeling that way the whole time too.

Lorde qualifies her own avoidant behaviors — her issues with body image, her defense mechanisms, and her own culpability in projecting a more guarded persona. As with the rest of Brat, Lorde’s narration is that of a paragraph long text message, ignoring most rhyme schemes and focusing on unfiltered honesty.

The resulting remix is poignant and cathartic, yes, but it’s also dealt with in such a pedestrian, two-friends-hashing-it-out way. There hasn’t really been anything like it before, and the novelty is rewarding — meanwhile, it serves as a bit of a middle finger towards the war hawk fans in pop music who’d prefer reality show theatrics instead of genuinely nuanced takes. Charli strikes again, and as always, she sounds even better in company.

— Paolo Ragusa

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