The feral lime-green feminine frequency that won’t stop multiplying

Somewhere last year between a sticky club floor and the sonic glitter of a digital diary entry, Brat Summer crash-landed and we’re pretty sure she booked a one-way flight. 

Charli XCX’s BRAT was dropped in early June 2024 then suddenly detonated. This synthetic lime green glow of an album cover was a manifesto of girlhood in freefall, chasing pop highs and existential lows. The album defined the season. Summer 2024 went down in history as Brat Summer and became a subculture that celebrates individualism and a certain lifestyle, marked by distinct visuals: untamed femininity flowing with rebellion, wild freedom as well as raw vulnerability.

Suddenly being chronically online, too self-aware, too into yourself, too loud and blunt yet still quiet and shy was the blueprint. Brat Summer is now a lifestyle, basically the opening salvo in a weird diva renaissance, a moment when pop’s most intriguing outcasts decided to synchronise their artistic strengths.

But brat(ty) as a lifestyle has always been here. She does not walk alone but multiplies, mutates, glitches then spirals into new forms. Right now she is showing up as a holy trinity in pop music: Charli’s neon drenched album BRAT. Lorde’s upcoming album Virgin, arriving this June 27. Addison Rae’s debut album ADDISON. Three women with their own paths, orbiting the same truth: there’s power in being a little unhinged. In letting the mess show. In taking the grotesque, sticky moments of girlhood and making them divine.

The Architecture of BRAT

There’s a meticulous chaos at the heart of BRAT, a kind of radical pop architecture that knows exactly what it’s tearing down. This isn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It’s a considered dismantling of the overproduced digital sheen that has flattened pop into algorithmic perfection. In an age where everything is curated for virality, Charli XCX chooses rupture.

The album’s visual language alone screams counter-aesthetic. That highlighter neon green cover, with its lo-fi Helvetica-like typography casually slapping ‘BRAT’ on the front and calling it a day, feels like a direct refusal to play by the hyper-curated standards of today’s streaming-centric pop.

Sonically, BRAT is raw, pulsing, and at times deliberately jarring, yet also vulnerable and depressive. But that discomfort is the message. Charli leans into abrasive synths, stuttering BPMs, and vocals that oscillate between confession and provocation. Tracks like 360 and Rewind are diaristic monologues set to glitch. 

Even the vulnerability is stylised like a bruise you show off. She flaunts her neurosis, grief, jealousy, insecurity and the thirst for relevance. None of it gets the soft-focus treatment.

Charli’s architecture of BRAT isn’t about destruction for spectacle but a form of liberation. She tears down the polished palace of pop not to leave a ruin but to build a rave altar for the flawed, feral, hyper-feeling girl.

The Virgin Prophecy

Lorde is gearing up to drop her long-awaited fourth studio album Virgin in June 2025 – early signals suggest she’s leaning deeper into her own brand of beautiful weirdness.

Virgin gets brat-pilled. Not in mimicry, but in symbiosis. This looks less like a rebrand and more like a séance, conjuring holiness through hedonism. The brat girls have stopped pretending they’re above it all, now proudly swimming in the mess: eyeliner smeared, glitter tears, guts spilled. Lorde’s new tracks for sure aren’t here to soothe that beautiful spiral toward self-acceptance. They’re here to throw glitter on the wreckage, kiss the bruise and crown the spiralling healing girls as saints of their own chaos.

Her rollout tracks spell it out in that familiar neon chaos: What Was That, Man of the Year and Hammer, with the latter being described as “an ode to city life and horniness,” a phrase that captures the unhinged poetry that made Pure Heroine a generational chokehold. Word is that Virgin promises to be her most human record yet, which might also make it her most alien.

Lorde appears to be returning to her natural habitat, those liminal spaces between adolescence and adulthood, between desire and fulfilment, between the mundane and the transcendent. 

The Addison Arrival

Perhaps most surprising is the ascension of Addison Rae. From TikTok dance star to the mind behind one of today’s most anticipated music projects, her debut album ADDISON is unprecedented. It’s a striking transmutation of social media capital into artistic credibility – and a remarkably good one.

What makes Addison’s transformation so compelling is how she leans into the inherent strangeness of her position. The album is described as “the first & last album by Addison Rae,” suggesting this is less about launching a pop career and more about crafting a singular artistic statement. There’s something beautifully absurd about positioning yourself as both debut and swan song at once – the wild idea of debuting with a farewell.

Weirder, Messier, Louder…Hotter

So here we are. Mid 2025. The brat girls begat the cult girls who later begat the icon girls. They’re all in each other’s footnotes and dedication pages. They all remember the 2014 Tumblr fragments. The whole thing is really built on late-night feelings and early morning genius. It’s the weird girl industrial complex. Together, they’ve built a new mythology for pop where weirdness isn’t just exotic seasoning. 

In this upside-down world and so-called weird climate, the normal girl is the strangest one of all. And maybe Brat Summer was never really about the calendar. It goes beyond just a definition of Summer 2024. It was the moment many stopped knocking, asking to be let in and realised they already owned their own space. With these great opening acts, what comes next might be weirder, messier, louder and hotter, but also freer and more debilitating.

This won’t be neat. It won’t sit pretty and play nice. It will be loud, messy and maybe kind of uncomfortable. It will surely rip through pop’s polished surface, burn down the walls built to keep things safe and neat. Because once you start painting outside the lines on purpose you stop dressing for the gaze and start dressing for the glitch. You dance with your shadows. You romanticise the breakdown. There’s something terrifying about it, but that freedom to be wild, ugly and unfiltered all at once is a much-needed soundtrack in today’s so constructed and performative world.