Fluorescent green and blurry lowercase text defined summer 2024 after the early-June release of brat, British pop star Charli XCX’s sixth studio album. From billboards and merchandise to fan profile pictures and memes, topped off with Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s adaptation for her campaign, it’s safe to say that brat green has really outdone itself in terms of marketability. But did you know that the iconic cover art design was actually a cost-cutting measure for the project?
Charli revealed the truth during her Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe earlier this week ahead of the release of brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, the first remix album for the project debuting on Friday, October 11. The singer is playing songs from the highly anticipated album during a mysterious event at the Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York today.
“Where the actual, first idea of doing a text cover came from was to save money, because I was like ‘this album is not going to appeal to a lot of people,’” she told Lowe point-blankly, also noting that she hasn’t talked about this in public before. “I think I was like ‘I’ll do a press shoot, and then maybe we just save on the album cover and maybe it’s like cool.’”
Explaining how she’s been on every cover apart from her 2016 EP Vroom Vroom, the artist said that the minimalist text cover for brat “punctuates the pattern in a really nice way.”
Her decision didn’t go over well with everybody, though, and she got quite a bit of pushback from her team and her friends.
Charli moved forward with the idea after making some design mock-ups on her phone, stating that the concept, especially her physical absence from the cover, “very much embodies the word ‘brat.’”
The shade of green was selected on the basis of whichever variation drew the most averse reaction from her team, and the blurry text is meant to connote a carelessness in not even bothering to get a high-res file.
“I knew that it would generate this conversation — I knew that a lot of people would be frustrated or disappointed by it,” Charli explained. “For me, it’s like I would rather have those conversations, which actually in some cases became quite explosive, than a picture where people are just like, ‘She looks good.’”
