How Pop 2—the clearest blueprint in Charli's catalog for a project like this—brat and… is loud and reckless, and it's really, really sad. But romantic love is not an issue here. Instead, brat and… sucks some of it up BRATis the main driving force: the idea that fame is too powerful, too damaging, and too insanely intoxicating for any one person to handle in a “normal” way.

The stakes are much higher now that my mother, your mother, and Ella Emhoff's mother have all identified as “Brat” at one time or another. It turns out that seeing the most famous woman in the world at your friend's show isn't as bad as hearing that your friends think you've changed; The question of whether you should have a baby is even more agonizing when the album that made you wonder whether you should have a baby becomes so successful that the next three years of your life are suddenly booked out. brat and… has a victory lap aesthetic—Ariana Grande co-sign, monumental first-day streams, strange activation at an idyllic Hudson Valley outdoor arts center—but its lyrics are often even more harrowingly dark than those on it BRATthe many hypotheses of this album suddenly became viscerally real.

BRAT was one of Charli's few featureless records, a fitting mode for an album about how isolating it was for her to spend a decade drifting in and out of the mainstream. The guests continue brat and… were apparently recruited with this sense of loneliness in mind: 1975's Matty Healy, Grande, Eilish and Bb Trickz are lightning rods forever known for their sharp tongues, thick mouths and tabloid provocations; Bladee and Yung Lean create an aesthetic of alienation; Justin Vernon is indie music's most enduring epitome of aloneness; Lorde and Eilish spent their teenage years under scrutiny and scrutiny from the public and media.

None of these artists followed Charli's exact path, but they all, in their own ways, had to reckon with their own fame, their position in the industry, and the decision to chase easy success or follow their muse down the rabbit hole. Rather than trying unsuccessfully to foster connection with her audience – who will never be as rich, famous or exposed as she is – Charli writes with surgical specificity, a welcome change from the banal, condescending “I'm just like you” vibe, which has become commonplace lately. The downside, of course, is that these songs sometimes veer into one-percent solipsism (“It's a knife when you're so pretty, they think it must be fake”), but they seem truthful in their mashups of folly and desperation.