Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In “Apple”, one of the songs on Charli XCX’s new album, the singer takes a bite from the eponymous fruit like Eve in the garden of Eden. The music pays tribute to the sound of the 1980s, the year zero of today’s chart pop. But the apple turns out to be rotten. Charli experiences a powerful urge to flee the allegorical scene and escape. The dodgy fruit has awoken her to the knowledge of imperfection.Pop music is haunted by the notion of perfectibility. The perfect pop song exists as a concept in a way that the perfect novel or perfect film does not. Music’s ability to trigger emotional responses raises the tantalising promise of finding a chord progression or beat that no one can resist. Charli touched on this idea in her 2014 hit “Boom Clap”, a song about the ecstatic pulse of a lovestruck heart that also functions as an ode to the alchemy of pop: “Boom clap, you make me feel good . . . ”Hailing from rural Essex near Stansted airport, the singer otherwise known as Charlotte Aitchison has always had a keen sense of how to style herself as a pop star. Her knowingness is a useful quality in an industry with a history of moulding young women into an ideal without regard for personal consequences. But it can also become a suffocating form of self-invigilation.She made a conscious effort to turn herself into a mainstream star on 2022’s Crash. It reached UK number one, but the songs were airless. Brat is the corrective. Made with regular collaborator AG Cook of the label PC Music, a seedbed of pop conceptualism, the album is one of her best. Britney-style electropop (“Von Dutch”, “B2b”) tips into full-tilt dance numbers (“Club Classics”, “365”). Low-key ballads about big topics (“I Think About It All the Time”, ie having a baby) rub shoulders with party anthems (“Mean Girls”).Charli’s singsong vocals are computer processed and edited to the umpteenth degree. But she also displays a greater degree of vulnerability than usual, airing insecurities and feelings of loss. Beginning and ending with a mirrored melody, the album sets up an intriguing play of forces between symmetry and messiness. The perfect pop song, we are given to understand, contains an element of human imperfection.★★★★☆‘Brat’ is released by Atlantic Records
