It is a truth universally acknowledged that Charli XCX likes to write songs about cars—and sometimes even perform alongside them. (Just take the music video for thundering fan favorite “Vroom Vroom,” with its scissor door Lamborghini, or the visual for Barbie banger “Speed Drive,” in which she skids around a parking lot in a hot pink Corvette.) But in her new “Von Dutch” video—released today as the first single off her upcoming sixth album, Brat—Charli is taking her passion for motorized transport to the next level. Goodbye sports cars; hello jumbo jets. “When we found out we were going to shoot most of the video in Charles de Gaulle I kind of couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I knew it was going to be amazing.”
It’s a fearless and furious introduction to her new record—and the most exhilarating video she’s ever made. Stomping down a travelator to her departure gate, Charli whips off her sunglasses and skirt to greet the swarms of paparazzi and fans before leaping to the ground to cling to the back of a floor-cleaning machine. (Don’t try this at home.)
One minute, she’s jumping the boarding gate and skipping across the tarmac; the next, she’s hurling herself around the craft’s interior. Somehow, she finds herself gyrating and crawling across the wing of the plane and punching the camera, then leaping off the wing into a baggage cart, then being dropped, battered and bruised, onto the luggage carousel. It’s the wildest episode of Border Security the world has ever seen.
Clearly, it was as much fun to make as it is to watch. To bring it to life, Charli and her creative director Imogene Strauss turned to Torso, the maverick photography and filmmaking duo behind the Mugler campaign films that broke fashion’s internet during the pandemic. “I had this concept that I wanted to be kind of physically attacking the camera, who I suppose sort of represents my ‘rival’ in the song,” she says. “I filmed a load of stuff on my iPhone and sent it to them, [and] I explained I had this idea that was deeply rooted in camera tricks. I know they have this super expansive knowledge of camera rigging and how a camera can move; I’ve seen it in a lot of their work—particularly the films they’ve shot for Mugler—and so I knew they could translate my vision into something truly epic.”
As a jet-setting pop star who’s likely been on a million airplanes in her lifetime, how did it feel to, well, dance on the wing of one? “It was actually so scary,” she says, laughing. “I was in a harness so I was safe, but it had rained just before the shot and the plane wing had this massive curve to it—so sometimes I would just randomly slip and fall and slide towards the edge of the wing, which was terrifying. Fun though!”
The video is a balls-to-the-wall return that feels fitting for a song that more than lives up to the album’s title. (As the opening lyric goes: “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me!”) “It’s kind of a punch: aggressive, confrontational, icy, in-your-face,” says Charli of her decision to lead with “Von Dutch” as a single. “All the things a brat is. It just felt natural.”
The album’s clubbier sound, on the other hand, takes its cues from the east London warehouse parties where Charli staged her first performances as a teenager, as well as her love for the boisterous electro-pop of the late-’00s bloghouse era, particularly the artists who came up via the Paris-based label Ed Banger Records. “I just needed to go back there, particularly after how traditionally pop Crash felt,” she says of the dance-inflected sound. “I always work in contrasts—each thing I do has to be completely polar opposite to the next thing. Electronic music is also my true love, and at the beginning of my career I was starting out in raves in London, so it kind of feels like going back to my roots.” On “Von Dutch,” co-produced by her “Speed Drive” collaborator EasyFun, though, these references are whizzed up into something entirely fresh: A squelchy synth line threads its way through the song like a ribbon of rocket fuel, beginning as a pulsating growl, then erupting when the chorus hits into a squeal like tires hitting the tarmac.
Most striking of all, though, is the album’s artwork, a lo-res, lurid green square with Brat written in a blurry sans serif. “I could literally write an essay on this,” she says. “I mean, as a female pop artist, what’s more bratty than not being on your album cover? Especially when there is so much pressure for women within the pop sphere to do exactly that. Also, the blur of the font, it kind of looks like a low-res upload. The troll of it all! The disgusting green… a color that’s so oversaturated within recent trends… but the fact it’s the kind of wrong type of green. The fact that people are like, ‘I could have made this in five minutes,’ and the fact that my response is, ‘Well, yeah, but you didn’t.’ All those things make this cover so exciting to me, because it opens up this door to so much commentary on pop culture itself.”
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Inside the vinyl, though, you’ll find a series of moodily sensual images of Charli shot by the British art and fashion photographer Harley Weir, her natural curls let loose over pared-back tank tops and bikinis. “It’s more minimal than anything I’ve done before,” she says of her styling approach for Brat. “I’m into having my staple favorites: a favorite YSL leather jacket, my favorite tank tops to party in. This album is truly for the party girls: sheer clothing, nipples out, room to sweat.”
Which brings us back to that title. With the Y2K revival in full swing, you could argue Von Dutch’s return to the limelight is long overdue. Is it a label that Charli has plans to personally adopt during her album campaign? Was she a Von Dutch wearer back in the day? “I actually wasn’t,” she says. “I never really knew how to get it, but I was super jealous of my friends who had Von Dutch caps. My use of that brand name was more about the idea of it being this cult classic brand. This thing that people on the internet scramble to get their hands on. Kind of like me: cult classic baby.” Arm doors and cross-check: Charli’s Brat era is ready for takeoff.
