Listen ‘Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat’: the remixes ranked

A mutual toast to battling through the career slog to reach the top of the mountain, the message of the Tinashe-featuring ​‘B2b’ remix is a righteous one: ​“Didn’t come out of nowhere / They been sleeping on me / I’m bored”. But dialling back the harder production of the original into something warmer loses some of the edge, especially for a song that gives a winking two fingers up whilst strutting to the peak of the podium.

Coming up from behind to become ​‘Brat’’s biggest viral hit thanks to its omnipresent dance trend, perhaps it’s this cutesy association that’s made the actual message of ​‘Apple’ — a musing on family and what you pass down — feel almost disconnected with the track’s image in popular culture. Here, The Japanese House​’s verses speak of familial estrangement (“I’m living in another country / Got another girlfriend that you’ve never met”) but it’s hard for the emotion behind the sentiment to fully cut through.

Where the OG ​‘Rewind’ reminisced about a simpler ​‘90s childhood of toenail polish and burning songs onto CD, this version is a far more intense, mentally-tumultuous take on the subject. ​“I’m six feet down beneath myself,” sings Bladee; ​“Sometimes I wanna wake up dead,” sings Charli. Even within a record that goes deep, it’s a troubled listen.

As soon as ​‘Brat and it’s completely different…’‘s list of guests was announced, the pairing of The 1975 with ​‘I might say something stupid’ seemed like the biggest open goal for a redemptive, acutely self-aware verse addressing Matty Healy’s own vast propensity for very public mistakes. Here, with the help of some glacial atmospherics ℅ Jon Hopkins, there are moments that do this well. ​“Don’t worry, it’s pretty common / It happens to a lot of guys,” is a clever double entendre on being cancelled, whilst a particularly poignant repeating of the original’s ​“I don’t know if I belong here anymore” line after a period of silence carries a lot of weight. Realistically, Healy’s words were always going to veer towards the oblique, but in a record that so often puts its painful cards so clearly on the table, sometimes you just want him to say the damn thing.

An absolute filthy banger, ​‘Club classics’ 2.0 not only adds a vibey Spanish language verse from BB Trickz, it also acts as sort of hybrid ​‘Brat’ remix track within a track, interpolating ​‘365’’s iconic ​“bumpin’ that”, speeding up Charli’s original vocal and adding a bouncing, riotous beat that could turn a dancefloor into a mosh pit.

OK, yes, we know it is relatively unforgivable to keep Robyn out of the album’s top ten, especially when so many lyrics here are full of joyous self-references (“Got everybody in the club dancing on their own”). But whilst the majority of ​‘360’ is a playful, conversational celebration of its stars, opting to keep fairly true to the vibe of the original, we just simply cannot forgive the worst line on the whole record: ​“I started so young, I didn’t even have email / Now my lyrics on your booby”. Um… cool?

If this version of ​‘Von dutch’ had been released first, its conveyor belt of killer internet-facing put-downs would have been instantly iconic. For its outro alone, we must give praise: ​“All these girls are like, ​‘Can I get a picture?’ / And then they go online like, ​‘Just kidding, I hate you’ ”. As a snapshot of the current culture, it’s laser sharp and miserably accurate. However Addison Rae and A.G. Cook​’s version must sit at Number Ten, purely because it can never quite match up to the launch of its original forebear, which introduced us to the world of ​‘Brat’ and changed pop music forever.

One of the bonus numbers on ​‘Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not’ (remember when we thought THAT was the epitome of Charli treating us), ​‘Spring breakers’ is the perfect choice to feature Kesha, one of this century’s OG party girls. Nodding to the remix album’s overall preoccupation with the nature and price of success (“art is not a competition”), her guest verse is full of braggadocio, bounce, and a brain-scratching reference to ​‘TiK ToK’ — the ​’10s club anthem, guys, not the app. Still, for such a meeting of minds, there’s something about this collab which feels frustratingly like colouring within the lines.

Where many of the hook-ups on ​‘Brat and it’s completely different…’ made total sense within Charli’s known circles, we did not anticipate Julian Casablancas making an entry into the xcx universe. When you think about The Strokes leader’s far more experimental, electronic work with his other band The Voidz, however, it doesn’t seem so strange. ​‘Mean girls’ is perhaps the song that sounds most like its guest and least like Charli; Julian’s verses could literally be lifted from the weirder end of The Strokes’ cutting room floor. It’s a curveball, but one that you can easily imagine teenage Charli getting her kicks from. Points, however, must be deducted for not including the original’s ​“New York City’s darling” line. Come on guys, he’s RIGHT THERE…

For this moving tribute to the late, great SOPHIE, there are few people that would have made sense to bring into the fold. It works, then, that for an update that sees her celebrating the good times and lifting up the memories of her friend, Charli would keep it within the inner circle, working only with ​‘Brat”s producer and SOPHIE’s PC Music peer A.G.Cook. ​“Now I wanna think about the good times,” Charli repeats as she reminisces about the night they met and the impact SOPHIE had on her. Much as grief comes in stages, so this tribute feels just as touching as the original in its determined positivity.

When Charli took to John Kennedy’s Tape Notes podcast, her walk through of ​‘365’ was iconic: an immersive stumble through a night out that anyone who’s partied a little too hard will instantly recognise. If, according to that, the original was like tumbling through different rooms in a club, then this two-minute Shygirl remix is like finding the sex dungeon in the basement. Warped, pounding, and featuring Shy’s lusty lyrics (“Too hot, when I sweat, just lick me / Touch and squeeze when the bassline hits me”), it’s pure hedonism, packed into 120 seconds.

Let’s start off by pointing out that, at this point in the list, every track is basically a 10/10. We’re splitting hairs here, but hey — we’re just living that life. Teaming up with her SWEAT tour partner Troye Sivan, it would have come as a surprise to no one that their take on ​‘Talk talk’ was even more thirsty than the original. “ ​‘Kay, here’s the plan / I wanna fly you out to Amsterdam / I got a good hotel to fuck you in,” sings Troye, in far sweeter tones than his raunchy proposal might suggest. Cheeky, sassy and an absolute bop, it’s a sterling addition to the pair’s series of collabs, from the excellent ​‘1999’ onwards.

Where the original made its title seem like a definitive statement, here ​‘Everything is romantic’ seems inbuilt with a question mark at the end. Structured around a late night phone call between Charli and Caroline, it picks up a common motif around much of the album: the wrestle between actively wanting this next level of top tier success, whilst acknowledging its multiple testing elements. ​“It’s like you’re living the dream / But you’re not living your life,” Caroline suggests. Charli replies: ​“I knew that you would relate”. There’s still romance to be found but it ends with the image of xcx calling from a photoshoot, trying to convince herself. ​“Living that life is romantic, right?”

Justin Vernon — aka Bon Iver — was another perhaps surprising name on the call sheet for ​‘Brat and it’s completely different…’, but the singer’s inimitable, heartbreaking vocal tones are the perfect foil for the album’s most vulnerable moment. Charli moves the original’s conversation about potential motherhood and the omnipresent ticking body clock on with an update of how, now more than ever, the pressure to capitalise on her current success feels overwhelming. “ ​‘Cause you’re not supposed to stop when things start working,” she suggests. Throughout, Vernon’s heavenly vocals are the soothing angel on the other shoulder as they both ask: ​“When did it get so hard?”

Catapulting straight to the UK Number One spot and becoming one of the biggest singles of the year along the way, no amount of sniping online discourse regarding Billie​’s verse could stop ​‘Guess’ prevailing as the cheekiest, most playful banger of the record. What do you get when you put two of modern pop’s most singular, self-aware, boundary-pushing pioneers on the same track? You get a saucy wink in musical form, that knows exactly what it’s doing but makes it sound effortless and huge (with a little help from The Dare and about 10,000 pairs of knickers).

The internet wanted it to be Taylor, but realistically, it was never going to be. We would argue, however, that the end result is far better: not only because the last thing the world needs is more Swift discourse, but also because Ariana has lived a career that puts her in prime position to chip in on matters of celebrity. Here, the knife in question is dug in by the press, by the friends that say you’ve changed, by the public who ​“want to see you fall to the bottom” as soon as you reach the top. Of all the tracks on ​‘Brat and it’s completely different…’, it’s the one that feels the most hot off the presses: a completely real-time snapshot of the head-fuck that the last summer has thrown Charli in, underscored by a fellow star who’s been through that wringer many times over.

Not just the best song on the album, but one of the greatest answer tracks of all time. When ​‘Girl, so confusing featuring Lorde’ landed it felt like something of a cultural reset; a line drawn in the sand of all the decades of pitting women against women, carved out by two stars at the top of their field refusing to play that game anymore. Completely raw and vulnerable, it felt both momentous and totally relatable hearing Lorde’s responses — a reminder not to let the assumptions and insecurities take over but to just talk it out and, as she sings, work it out on the remix. A truly landmark achievement.

Tags: Features, AG Cook, Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Bladee, Bon Iver, Caroline Polachek, Charli XCX, Jon Hopkins, Julian Casablancas, Kesha, Lorde, Robyn, Shygirl, The 1975, The Japanese House, Tinashe, Troye Sivan, Yung Lean