TRACK REVIEW: Charli XCX - Baby — Music Musings & Such

TRACK REVIEW:

Charli XCX

Baby

9.6/10

The track, Baby, is available from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggrYaDxyrGM

RELEASE DATE:

1st March, 2022

ORIGIN:

Cambridge/Essex, U.K.

GENRE:

Electro-Pop/Dance Pop

The album, CRASH, is available from 18th March, 2022. Pre-order here:

https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/charli-xcx/crash/lp

TRACKLISTING:

Crash

New Shapes (ft. Christine and the Queens and Caroline Polachek)

Good Ones

Constant Repeat

Beg for You (ft. Rina Sawayama)

Move Me

Baby

Lightning

Every Rule

Yuck

Used to Know Me

Twice

PRODUCERS:

G. Cook/Ariel Rechtshaid/Deaton Chris Anthony/Digital Farm Animals/George Daniel/Ian Kirkpatrick/Ilya/Jason Evigan/Jon Shave/Justin Raisen/Lotus IV/Mike Wise/Oneohtrix Point Never/Oscar Holter

LABELS:

Asylum/Atlantic/Warner UK

__________

I have included Charli XCX…

a few times on this site over the past few weeks. I wanted to include her again, as her fifth studio album, CRASH, is out on 18th March. It is going to be a huge album from the Cambridgeshire-born, Essex-raised artist. One of the most talented, special and compelling Pop artists of her era, this is a moment when we will see Charli XCX hit new heights. A modern-day queen who has legions of adoring fans, Charlotte Aitchison is going to be making the very finest music for years to come. I will refer to her as ‘Charli XCX’ through his review rather than ‘Charlotte Aitchison’. I am going to look back at Charli XCX’s last two albums, just to give a sense of what she was saying in interviews and how she was being seen through the media. Charli was released in 2019. Her greatest album to that point, it marked a real sense of growth and ambition from Charli XCX. Five years after Sucker arrived – an album that I maintain is underrated -, this was a revelation. FADER asked Charli XCX about, what they say is, her most personal album yet:

“I want to talk about naming the album Charli. Did you go into it thinking that that was going to be the title?

No. I'm actually really bad with album names. I mean, I named True Romance. I named Sucker. I mean, I named Vroom Vroom. But Pop 2, Tommy Cash actually named Pop 2, because I was like, "What should we call it?" Tommy was like, "Hey, it's future pop. You should call it Pop 2." We were like, "Great, all right, cool." So, with Charli, I was throwing around all these names and nothing felt right. I don't know, I was considering tying in the 3 aspect still of like, Number 1 Angell, Pop 2, something 3. I don't know. Then, I just couldn't figure it out at all, and A.G. was like, "Just call it Charli, because it's you." I was like, "Ah, fuck. I did it again."

So yes, we went for Charli, and it just felt right, and we'd been, I don't know, at the time we named it, I was figuring out fonts for the album and that kind of thing and we were seeing my name a lot, and it just felt right. I guess most unoriginal statement ever, it's like my most personal body of work. So, it does make sense. I think encapsulates everything that I've done. There are elements of True Romance. There are elements of the mixtapes. There are elements of Vroom Vroom. Maybe even elements of Sucker and it's most pop moments. So, it kind of just feels like everything that I've been experimenting with over the past 10 years, whatever it is, however old I am, I can't remember.

“This is your 'most personal album yet,' but also there's so many people involved in it. I was thinking about the idea of how the communities around us kind of make us who we are, and that you can be your most vulnerable self on this album. Not because of these people, but I think seeing all these collaborations weave in and out of the album, it kind of has this thread of your peers lifting you up and you being able to get to that place with a little help from your friends.

Yeah. That's actually funny, because the album was going to be called Best Friends. That was a title for a while that we were thinking about, which that's kind of cool you said that. But yeah, it is really that. Like the community that I'm in, and the kind of community that I'm surrounded by, which is basically the LGBTQ community because I really feel like I'm so emersed in that in all aspects of my life. My friends, when I go out, my collaborators, it's really prominent and so important to me. I do feel like I am able to be vulnerable in that space, because I feel so comfortable there, you know? I feel like that is a community that has really embraced who I truly I am and made me feel less afraid to be myself and speak my mind when before I kind of was. So yeah, the collaborators, they really do give me that strength, for sure.

This album would not be possible without them. I'm an artist and I have an ego, for sure, but I can really comfortably say that none of these songs would be possible without the people that I work with, because they are so inspiring to me, and they bring their own worlds and their own flavor and their own insight to the work that I do, and it's really inspiring to me. I never feel threatened. I just feel so ready to learn and listen to people who've had different experiences from me and lived different lives. Yeah, it's really cool. I really love it. The collaborators make me feel very comfortable. Comfortable, but still, I think, allow me to be very progressive at the same time.

Do you have any hopes for how your fans interpret this project, or where you're going to take it from here?

I hope my fans love this album. If they don't, that's okay, but I hope they love it. I hope that they feel inspired and emotional and joy. I hope they party to it. I hope they play it fucking loud. I don't know, I never really think about the hopes. It's just out now. It's out now. I just hope people fucking like it. But also, I don't care if they don't. I don't know. I like it, that's the main thing. I'm really proud of it. I really like it. Honestly, I know I'm not supposed to say this, I'm supposed to be so in it like, "This album's streaming, buy it now." But I'm thinking about the next one. I'm like, it's done. I'm just like, onto the next”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer

I do feel like Charli was a watershed moment when we saw this transition. A promising Pop artist raising the stakes and upping the ante. A terrific album that was followed only a year later by how I’m feeling now. Released on 15th May, 2020, this was one of the first ‘pandemic albums’: artists releasing albums during the time that were more D.I.Y. than normal. With a lot recorded at her home and things being a bit strange, her fourth studio was very different to Charli. Overloaded with killer hooks, personal lyrics and some of Charli XCX’s finest vocal performances, I am surprised that she managed to release such a terrific album so soon after Charli. More than that, during the start of a pandemic, many would have forgiven her for holding the album back. As it was, she gave the fans something wonderful at the start of a very bad time for us all. Stereogum interviewed Charli XCX in April 2020:

“The coronavirus pandemic has forced all of us to put just about everything on hold: No matter what you thought your big plans for life in 2020 were, they’re not happening anytime soon. That’s been felt in the music world, too, with festival and tour cancellations and postponements, and with artists delaying their albums to what once seemed like a plausible post-quarantine summer date. But as we move further into this, and as it becomes clearer that normal life isn’t coming back anytime soon, some artists are changing their plans not to hold off but to make things happen in quarantine. Laura Marling and Fiona Apple both already moved their albums up earlier in the year, each feeling like a gift when we could all use new music to distract us from the news. And then there’s Charli XCX, who quickly announced her plans to record and release an album in just over a month.

As New York and LA first settled into the social-distancing/shelter-in-place guidelines, Charli began by sharing a quarantine diary. In the first entry, she admitted that this sort of scenario was daunting for a person like her — a self-professed workaholic accustomed to always being on the move, always having another project in the pipeline. It didn’t take long for her to turn this time into something positive — an opportunity to make an album quickly, at home, during the quarantine and at least partially cataloging her experience with it. She announced she’d release the album, tentatively titled How I’m Feeling Now, on 5/15.

The whole project is, by nature, unplanned and in-the-moment. Charli’s been sending material back and forth with her main producers, BJ Burton and A.G. Cook, as well as other potential collaborators. She’s been uploading snippets of unfinished songs and scattered lyrics from her phone, asking fans to weigh in on what they like and what they want to hear finished next. It’s meant to be an open process — an artist not only working on an album for this time, during this time, but also inviting her fans to take part in it. In a way, it gives everyone something to be involved in.

STEREOGUM: In the beginning when you kind of said this would be more DIY, using the tools in front of you etc., but as these demos are starting to come together and as these tones and themes are cohering, what’s the overall vibe of the album? Obviously it’s going to be a little different than the last one, which was quite big and had all these guest appearances. Do you think this is sonically or aesthetically a thing you might’ve been working on right now anyway, or it feels very specific to this experience?

CHARLI XCX: Before quarantine, around January or February, I was working on a completely different album which I wanted to put out in August or September. That album was probably my most polished, I’ll say, aesthetically and possibly musically, too. I was listening to a lot of Janet Jackson and was quite inspired and leaning into that. This sound was taking quite a different turn for me. But I paused the album when quarantine happened, even though I had written quite a bit for it, just because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to execute the visual side of that album.

At the beginning of the year I did say I wanted to release two albums this year, so I had actually already begun discussing the idea of doing an album in December, where we would maybe in September go somewhere and really hunker down, me and A.G. and possibly SOPHIE if she was around, and write something in two or three weeks. I already had that idea towards the end of last year, so when this global pandemic arose, I was thinking, “OK, maybe I can do that album now but we won’t be in the same place.” There was no discussion about what that should sound like. Generally I don’t really have a premeditated vision of what each album will sound like. It’s very much like, I make stuff and I feel it out and I see what feels right and run with it. That’s kind of what I’m doing with this one.

STEREOGUM: It’s a bit hard to plan for what comes after all this given we don’t really know when/how we’ll go back to normal life, but do you think you’ll return to these other ideas you had in progress, like the Janet LP and the True Romance anniversary shows?

CHARLI XCX: Honestly it’s kind of impossible to say. The album I was making… I would like to release that at some point. But it really just depends on what feels right. I think another reason why that album wouldn’t feel right for right now, it’s just not the right tone. Revisiting something like True Romance, I would love to do that at some point but it wouldn’t be the right time in the world. I think the reason that this particular album I’m making now, that I do feel comfortable making it, is because it’s so collaborative, because through the creation of the music and artwork I’m also able to support other creatives who are maybe struggling to find work right now, and I’ve always wanted to collaborate with them and now is the time.

There is so much to be done because there are no rules with this project. I can make three artworks for one song if I feel like. It’s about creating as much as possible. The time feels right, because I’m able to give my platform to people who maybe aren’t able to make their work as they usually would. And hopefully through this album we’ll be able to set up some charity initiative, hopefully with LA Alliance. Basically, auction off all the artwork that’s created as originals and rough prints and donate all of that money to charity. It feels like the right tone, whereas doing a big really glossy album within this time period or even planning for that coming later when I don’t know what’s going to be going on, I don’t know that it would feel right for me personally. Who knows”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Bridgland for Rolling Stone

Bringing things to more recent times, it is great that Charli XCX released how I’m feeling now two years ago. The album is her best so far. She did so much promotion around the release of the album and she has been working really hard since. I do feel there is this pressure on big modern artists like her. I will come to it, but Charli XCX recently has said how she has been getting a lot of sh*t on social media for a number of reasons. A recent track she recorded with Rina Sawayama got some blowback. It must be a constant battle (when it comes to social media) engaging with fans and trying to do the right thing – whilst being true to you –, and also having to face negativity and the darker side of thing. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, we discover more about the real person. It is an interview that reveals a lot about the human and down to earth nature of a super-famous, modern-day sensation:

“Charli – whose real name is Charlotte Emma Aitchison – considers this straightforward interpretation of Crash and decides she likes it. It reflects her current state of mind: “I almost just feel like this album title is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. I feel very explosive right now. I feel very on the edge, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way,” Aitchison continues, her voice wavering. “I feel good when I’m rehearsing for tour, when I’m moving my body. I feel safe and at home there. Basically any time I’m not doing that I feel… like a time bomb, I suppose. I don’t really know what I’m saying, sorry…”

PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Bridgland for Rolling Stone

You wouldn’t have been able to tell she was feeling turbulent had you met her in north-east London the previous week. Charli XCX arrives at our photoshoot as every transatlantic popstar should: with an indefinable air of importance and like a blank canvas ready to be transformed (sporting a cap, bleached eyebrows over sunglasses and a puffa coat that could sleep two arctic explorers). The self-professed workaholic was professional and polite. In latex pants and skin-tight leotards, she moved through her poses and angles for hours with precision and energy. Once the Rolling Stone UK mic was in hand, she said, with deadpan humour: “Being a pop icon is very turbulent. The highs are high and the lows are low and the iconicness has to stay at such a high level that sometimes you can really get exhausted just from being so, so iconic.”

Fifty minutes after the shoot wrapped, she posted on Twitter that she was leaving the app and would likely draft tweets and allow her team to post them instead. “I’ve been grappling quite a lot with my mental health the past few months and obviously it makes negativity and criticism harder to handle when I come across it,” she wrote, attributing this criticism to song-release choices, the campaign roll- out and what was necessary to fund “the greatest tour” she’s ever planned.

What she had to do was agree to play at an NFT festival called Afterparty. Fans gave her a “lot of flack” for that decision but, as she later explains over a video call with the camera off, it doesn’t matter any more. “I pulled out of the festival. That was my decision that I made and I didn’t feel the need to announce it or let them know or whatever – but I did pull out.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Rina Sawayama and Charli XCX

A minority of fans have been vocally critical of the heavily interpolated ‘Beg for You’ featuring Rina Sawayama. “I’ve been feeling quite low throughout 2022, to be honest. I feel like my mental health has really taken a toll,” Aitchison says, becoming tearful. “I’ve never cared if you like my music or hate my music – don’t listen to it if you don’t like it – but I think at a time when I was already feeling quite low, that kind of rhetoric honestly just really hurt my feelings. There is this misconception that people in the public eye are able to take any shit that you throw at them and yes, we do have to learn how to handle negativity and criticism because it comes with the territory, but at the same time, everyone’s a fucking human being. I guess on that day that I messaged that I felt more human than ever.”

As an extremely online artist, she understands that this is the nature of self-promoting yourself and your work on social media. “The second you see something negative written about yourself, I feel like it’s like survival of the fittest to focus in on that and try to protect yourself from the threat, the negative potential danger, in a really animalistic type of way.” On a macro level, someone like Charli XCX doesn’t care what the average person has to say. With a steely air, she adds: “Honestly, you can either get on my level and enjoy the fucking party or you can just not be invited because I don’t really care, do you know what I mean?” She laughs ruefully because posting her statement on Twitter meant a question about it in an interview and though she didn’t want to dwell on answering it for long, she has inadvertently drawn more attention to the scenario. “Obviously, never address anything publicly, that’s the vibe that I learnt from that”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pandora

I want to stick with the theme of online reactions and how that can affect an artist. An artist always pushing boundaries and exploring new ground, this is someone who, I think, has the same sort of sonic and aesthetic transformation and brilliance as Madonna. Unfortunately, like Madonna, Charli XCX has been criticised and seen to be selling out. This DAZED article asked the question about CRASH: “conceptual art, or a bashful embrace of mainstream pop?”:

“Charli’s latest Crash single – the Rina Sawayama-featuring “Beg For You” – is a perfect example of this “not very current” approach to popstardom, as a spin on September’s mid-00s dancefloor anthem “Cry For You”, with a thumping UK garage beat. “I felt like Crash wouldn’t really be a truthful representation of what it’s like to be a female pop artist signed to Atlantic Records without doing an interpolation song,” she tells Entertainment Weekly. “So I did it.”

Not everyone is buying into the singer’s nostalgic embrace of chart-toppers from decades gone by, though. While many stans stay dutifully hyped for Crash, others’ reactions range from ambivalence to straight-up outrage. “She is absolutely not staying true to her vision and art,” writes one Twitter user. “She’s making mid songs because the label told her to, which is fine go get that bag but let’s not act like she’s a genius for releasing generic radio garbage.”

“The ‘selling your soul to the label’ thing could’ve been done in such a thought-provoking way,” adds another commenter. “But I’m not really sure what these songs are meant to be subverting besides being standard radio songs.”

In true pop star fashion, however, Charli hasn’t taken the criticism lying down, coming for her online detractors like they’re an unenthusiastic crowd at a German music festival. “People be mad that i’m testing the major label system an art piece (sic) whilst still making bops,” she tweeted last week. “And honestly i love it.”

Unsurprisingly, this statement has only added fuel to the fire, with more fans honing in on the “art” aspect of the new album rollout. Namely: is it actually a conceptual art project, or it it just generic pop with arty pretensions? Internet drama aside, this is a valid question. Of course, any artist is entitled to release inoffensive synth pop and beg for streams, but why do some get to do it under the banner of Interesting Art, while others are called out for pandering and posting cringe? Is Charli’s “art piece” explanation all part of the plan, or an all-too-convenient excuse to dismiss the lacklustre response? Can we write off any ill-advised decisions as Art, and get away with it”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Charlotte Rutherford

How does a young and experienced Pop artist please everyone and manage to do something fresh and engaging?! It is more challenging now than ever for an artist to come through and succeed. I think that CRASH is going to be one of the albums of the year. Charli XCX is moving in new directions and, rather than pandering to a label, she is putting out music that sounds true to her and that she wants people to hear. The new single, Baby, which I shall come to in a minute when I review it, is a song oozing with fire, energy and sexuality! It has touches of the 1980s but is very modern; upbeat but quite shadowy in places. This is a phenomenal artist who deserves nothing but respect, trust and appreciation. Going back to that Rolling Stone interview, we discover more about the lead-up from how I’m feeling now to CRASH:

“For Aitchison to enjoy her new album, she had to surprise herself. The insular, fast-paced construction of how i’m feeling now informed its follow-up: “I knew I had to turn it up to high-octane, ten, pop-star level for it to feel fresh for myself.” Crash should have existed first: ‘New Shapes’, ‘Good Ones’, ‘Every Rule’ and ‘Twice’ were written, at least in part, before the previous album began but the pandemic halted it. She knew she wanted to put her own money into this big, impressive pop album and not being able to travel to collaborate with pop producers or put on her biggest tour yet made the entire venture redundant.

By September or October 2020, a few months after how i’m feeling now was finished and released, Crash became her focus. “This album was originally going to be called Sorry If I Hurt You and I liked that title because that sentence is both past, present and future,” she says. “You can say that sentence to someone as if you hurt them in the past or as if you’re going to hurt them or if you’re about to do it right there and then.”

Of all tenses, the album is most indebted to the past. While making it, she was listening to Control by Janet Jackson and songs by Cameo (though generally doesn’t consume music while in creation mode because it is a distraction). Inspiration for her retro bombshell look came from watching live performance videos of Madonna, 80s interior design and movies like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. You can see the research in the campiness of her humping her own gravestone in the video for ‘Good Ones’ or the bouffant hair with deadness between the eyes on the single covers: the visuals are equally indebted to sexploitation films, Elvira and Pat Benatar.

Lyrically and sonically, Crash conjures up the monumental drama of 80s music: sweeping landscapes, thunderous skies, bold colours and the expanse of a dancefloor half-empty and ready to be met with your misery. This mood is obviously felt in the interpolation tracks, like ‘Beg for You’, which uses September’s 2006 hit ‘Cry for You’, a song which in turn mimicked 80s classic, ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat. “It’s become a trend within pop music these days to be very referential of previous hits, which is cool if you’re into nostalgia, less cool if you’re into pure futurism. I feel like there’s a cool middle ground that can be met, which is hopefully what I’m doing,” Aitchison says. It’s also there in the way the 80s references are heightened by her own overwhelming and staggering emotions. Far from adopting the classic tactic of front-loading an album with hits, Crash builds to feature the best run of Charli songs yet, climaxing with stories about lust, love and heartbreak”.

Initially, messaging around the album indicated that it was about the destruction of the pop star in a manipulative and damning major label system. Charli XCX was using the spoils of her fifth and final record in her major label deal she signed with Atlantic to make a statement about autonomy and artistic freedom. With its album cover of the singer, bloodied and on the windscreen of a car in a bikini, Crash is an obvious reference to the J.G. Ballard novel of the same name. In the book, former car-crash victims seek sexual thrills from recreating the experience of crashes. In the Guardian, Zadie Smith wrote of the British postmodernist classic, “Crash is an existential book about how everybody uses everything. How everything uses everybody.”

“I’d never actually made a major label album in the way that it’s actually done,” Aitchison explains of Crash. “It felt interesting to me to use moments of that process to make this final album as somebody who has really navigated the major label record system since I was 16 in completely on my own terms.” It’s been a challenge for her. Between pitching to streaming platforms, making sure visuals align, waiting for answers to her questions and for drop dates, she has found it painfully slow: “I’m learning about patience and taking things a little bit slower, which is probably why I have so much time to look at the internet now. There’s a lot more promo and talking about yourself which one would think I’d be good at by now but I actually hate it.”

I like how her previous album had lowercase lettering (for streaming services; it was uppercase for physical releases) and was about how she was feeling now, in 2020. A cover that saw her on her bed looking thoughtful, playful and sexy, CRASH is this bold-type title where Charli XCX is on the bonnet of a car as thought she may go through the windscreen. Maybe the comedown from the past couple of years (a mental ‘crash’ as it were), I can see how Charli XCX wants to embrace a different sound and do something bigger for this album. After such a tough time, CRASH is an album that we all need. In a separate Rolling Stone interview, we get a sense of this artist still fighting to be understood and fully respected:

“Charli XCX has long been one of pop’s most galaxy-brained writers and performers, but she’s ready for what she calls her “main pop-girl moment.” With her upcoming album, Crash (due March 18), she presents a brilliant case: It’s an airtight pop project full of top-notch hooks that also functions as a quick tour through the past couple of decades of the genre. Like everything the artist does, Crash is, first and foremost, fun. “I think the people who know me and my work know that 50 percent of the time I’m entirely serious, and the other 50 percent of the time I’m a troll,” she says, calling from the English countryside. Crash follows 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now, an album she made under a tight deadline in Covid lockdown. She’s immortalized that process with a new documentary, Alone Together. Like the album whose creation it captured, the documentary is a deeply personal release, giving a glimpse into her private life and the emotional turmoil caused by the pandemic and a self-imposed deadline for the album. “Sometimes people don’t get it,” she says of her work. “Sometimes people don’t like it. But that’s what I like to do.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

I just watched the documentary—
Oh, God. . . .

Why “Oh, God”?

It feels like a different time, a different lifetime. Honestly, it’s hard to watch myself be so upset. Also, unfortunately, me and my partner at that time are no longer together. The whole thing is really emotional for me. I probably won’t be watching it again.

That film is a snapshot of your 2020, so I’m curious how your 2021 went.

I had actually begun making Crash prior to How I’m Feeling Now, but I decided to pivot from making that record when the pandemic hit and it was evident what the global state was. It felt quite drastic to get back into that swing after having made something [How I’m Feeling Now] in the most low-fi way I’ve made music since I was 14 and making things in my bedroom, to go from shooting music videos on a rented green screen in my basement to going to Mexico City to shoot with Hannah Lux Davis. But I always wanted projects to feel drastically different from one another.

Crash has a whole concept and narrative: The “evil pop star” who has made a deal with the devil. Was that something you had in mind when you first started the album?

I’ve always been interested in the idea of what a “sellout” is in modern-day pop music and if it even exists. I’ve been signed to a major label since I was 16. I think I’ve had quite an untypical major-label-artist journey, so it’s interesting to operate within that framework. I suppose this record and the imagery is partially a comment on that. It’s also partially a comment on what authenticity is. I think artists feel they need to really prove that they wrote their own songs, that they direct their own music videos, that they are the brain behind everything. As I got older, I began to care less and less about that because I know I can write a great pop song and I know I can communicate my vision.

When did you grow out of the mindset of needing to prove yourself? Was there a particular project or moment that made you start to say “Fuck what people think about pop music, about me, about what I’m doing”?

I think that’s been my mission station since post-Sucker, really when I began working with Sophie and A.G. Cook. From that point on, until now and probably beyond, it’s stayed the same. It’s hard. It’s not super tangible. Also, I’m constantly changing my mind about what I think, so that’s not very helpful either. I felt like that was beginning to become kind of like an expected sound from me, or an expected way that I did things. The reason making Crash felt so right is because I don’t think people expected me to do that. I always feel most myself when I’m challenging people and maybe sometimes confusing people”.

Let’s move to the new single from CRASH. Following songs like Beg for You and Good Ones, Charli XCX has released another gem! There is not refuting or resisting the sexiness of Baby and its video. Charli XCX has said it is one of her sexiest songs - and that were her intention. Having recently performed it on SNL in the U.S., the song starts with racing Disco strings that gets you hooked right away. The video has blue lighting, sort of giving it a cooler and calmer vibe. Charli XCX rises from a bed with this intent and sultry look on her face. In a moment I found quite comedic, as we have this tight shot of a bedroom opens up as Charli XCX is seen with two other women. They form a line and start this alluring and captivating dance. It is a nice shift between the intimate and something bigger. Baby is going to appear as the seventh track on CRASH. It was teased on a livestream on 4th November, 2021. Seeing it realised in a video is brilliant. Without doubt, it is one of the sexiest songs and videos Charli XCX has released! The introduction consisted of the word ‘baby’ and moans. It is sultry and sensuous. The first verse definitely sets out an itinerary and business plan that few could resist – even if it is going to require a bit of cleaning and straightening of the house afterwards!: “I'ma love you real, I'ma love you raw/I'ma love you in the kitchen/I'ma put you on the floor/Leave you wanting more/I'ma love you real, you might lose it all/I'ma make you my decision/I'ma put you on the floor/Leave you wanting-“. The composition blends Disco pop with higher notes, together with electronics that are a bit lower and more Pop-orientated. The fact the video features two other dancers and not just Charli XCX adds another layer of physicality, sexual rawness and power. The choreography is brilliant! Rather than having a hero in the video who Charli XCX would be directing her lust towards, this is even more intriguing and teasing. It is a message to a non-specific beau. When you watch the video, you are unable to look away!

More than anything, the song itself absolutely slaps! It is a wonderfully fiery, cool and mesmerising track that is just what we need right now. Although there are some similarities to her contemporaries like Dua Lipa, Charli XCX has her own vibe and lyrical personality. The way she sets the scene and takes control... Her narrative and storytelling is excellent: “I can see it in your eyes/You're nervous, but you know just what you want/If you're feeling scared, that's fine (That's fine)/I've got no problem taking full control/Baby”. The chorus bursts into life. In the video, Charli XCX and her two dancer remind me of Destiny’s Child in their movements, formation and power. This mantra and repeated lines of “I'ma make you my—, I'ma make you my—/I'ma make you my—, I'ma make you my— (Baby)” are delivered quickly and punchily. It is catchy right away. One wonders whether Charli XCX wrote the track about a current love or someone she has her visions set on. Although there is a twinkle and sense of fun in the composition – it is one that will raise the spirits and get you moving! -, the post-chorus let’s us know that our heroine means business: “I'ma fuck you up, yeah”. Running in at less than three minutes, Baby is a tight and fairly short song that packs so much in! Charli XCX does not need to put in aimless instrumentals or say too much. She gets her message out there and has concocted a modern-day Pop diamond. It seems like there may be doubts or hesitations from her crush. The second verses findings her singing “Why you tryin' to fight what's right?/(What's right, what's right, what's right)/You know I'm 'bout to change your life for good/You can play pretend, that's fine (That's fine)/I know the truth, you really wish you would/Baby”. Neon-lit, lush, bouncing and reminding me of a Disco cut that might have been heard at Studio 54 back in its heyday, the video has this simplicity that works perfectly. The lighting and dancing puts you in a club; maybe facing Charli XCX as she puts out her message and is starting the seduction. Breathtaking in so many ways, I think that Baby is the best cut from CRASH so far. It is another tantalising offering from an album that is going to be immense! The fact that the song ends with Charli XCX repeating “I'ma fuck you up, yeah” let’s you know that she means it. She is tough and has this edge that gives her work extra depth and resonance. Baby is an incredible track from an amazing artist that we should all…