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Sabrina, Charli and Chappell are suddenly stars. Why now?

Mikael Wood, Los Angeles Times on

Published in Entertainment News

LOS ANGELES — There were lime-green tube tops, lime-green beanies, lime-green hoodies and cowboy hats and sunglasses and at least one lime-green mesh vest like something an especially with-it street paver might wear. But even those not dressed in the glaring color of Charli XCX's glaring new album, "Brat," were showing their devotion to the English pop singer this month, shouting along with every word as she performed all 15 of the album's tracks for a capacity crowd vibrating with excitement at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles.

"I don't want to sing this one — I just want to hear you sing it," she said before the beat of "B2B" kicked in at a pulverizing volume, and nearly every person in the room seemed overjoyed to oblige her.

With tickets going for hundreds of dollars over face value on the secondary market, this recent sold-out concert was a convocation of the ultra-loyal Charli XCX fans — Charli's Angels, many call themselves — who've helped maintain her cult-fave status over the decade and change since she emerged in the early 2010s with appearances on hits like Icona Pop's "I Love It," which she co-wrote, and her own solo debut, "True Romance." For almost Charli's entire career, her tuneful yet edgy brand of electronic pop has held a distinct connoisseur's appeal — a kind of if-you-know-you-know energy that's endeared her only more deeply to her core following.

Yet signs keep mounting that the wider world is starting to pay attention.

"Brat," Charli's sixth studio LP, debuted last week at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, a career high for the 31-year-old musician. Reviews of "Brat" have been almost uniformly positive, including raves from the likes of Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and the Guardian.

Lorde, about whom Charli is broadly thought to have written the song "Girl, So Confusing," offered her take on Instagram, writing that "there is NO ONE like this b—"; the New Zealander then jumped on a remix of "Girl, So Confusing" that immediately racked up more than 5 million plays on Spotify after it dropped on Friday. And this fall, Charli will play arenas on a co-headlining tour with Troye Sivan.

 

For all her swagger at the Shrine, Charli on "Brat" anticipates the isolating experience of stardom; in the song "Rewind," she's already longing for the days "when I didn't overanalyze my face shape" and when she "used to never think about Billboard."

In fact, she's not alone: Charli's sudden ascent is just one of several we're seeing this summer, including Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, both of whom are putting up huge numbers after years of work in the trenches of pop music.

This week, Carpenter's song "Please Please Please" — a slinky yacht-rock jam about a famous woman's anxieties regarding a public relationship — topped the Hot 100 in just its second week on the chart, followed closely at No. 4 by her frothy neo-disco smash "Espresso"; a few days before, San Francisco's Outside Lands festival announced that it had tapped Carpenter, 25, as a last-minute headliner to replace Tyler, the Creator after he dropped out for unspecified reasons.

Roan, meanwhile, just entered the top 10 of Billboard's album chart for the first time with her grandly theatrical 2023 LP, "The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess," powered in large part by the 26-year-old's much-discussed appearances at Coachella and New York's Governors Ball festival. Asked by Jimmy Fallon on "The Tonight Show" the other day what it felt like to finally break through, Roan smiled and said, "It feels like I was right all along."

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