Artist: Charli XCX
Album: SUCKER
Genre: Pop
Label: Asylum Records

In the lead-up to SUCKER, I posited a comparison between Charli XCX’s current career arc and early 2000’s Avril Lavigne. Something about the former’s progression from what would now be considered Lorde-esque alt-pop to pop punk reminded me of a better version of Lavigne’s grunge-aping early work turning into the hot pink, skate punk-adjacent The Best Damn Thing.

That comparison wasn’t fair to Charlotte Aitchison. Avril Lavigne was never this goddamn punk.

In October, I attended the Charli XCX show at St. Andrew’s Hall in Detroit. Aitchison carried herself like a star, powering through her hits (including “I Love It” and “Fancy”) in a fur (or faux fur; not sure) coat and a slinky blue dress, nonchalantly shrugging off a small wardrobe malfunction along the way. St. Andrew’s is a punk stage, but this punk was a pop star on that stage.

The thing is, St. Andrew’s is not a pop star venue. It’s a club – a great club, but a club, with a cap of 900. Meghan Trainor sold it out not long after tickets went on sale (though I can’t say how many of those were scalpers); she might even be bumped up to Detroit’s Fillmore by the March 2 date. Charli XCX sold somewhere around 500-600 tickets by the time doors opened.

That’s a reasonable showing, but it’s not what you’d expect for someone who looks and sounds like Charli XCX, nor for an album that looks and sounds like SUCKER. Aitchison is pulling the equivalent of an upcoming rapper boasting about mansions he doesn’t have. It isn’t “fake it ‘til you make it,” but a pursuit of success by sheer force of will. She’s like a short basketball player, or a svelte football player. She has to bust her ass, with all the bravado she can muster, to get what Meghan Trainor achieved with a single song.

The good part is that she isn’t “selling out” to do it (although plenty of market savvy moves are being made, and who could blame her?). This isn’t “Boom Clap” flanked by twelve repurposings of the hit single. She can’t help but be a bit left of center. It’s just that now she’s no longer the alt girl in the corner; she’s a bird-flipping rebel in platform heels, backed by scuzzy guitars and punchy, pop-punk percussion. It should also be noted that her three-woman backing band, clad in all white, reinforces Charli’s new stance as a badass.

Just about every song is a fuck-off anthem for the adult-phobic youth. SUCKER is one of the best, most fitting titles for a pop album in a while, though that’s partially due to the fact that Miley Cyrus used “Bangerz” before Icona Pop could. If anything, “Boom Clap” is a bit out of place (though not terribly so).

But is it good? I hadn’t really gotten to that, and it feels like a 2A to everything that led to this point. The short answer is yes. Much like a number of critically-acclaimed, left of center pop pseudo-stars, the current iteration of Charli XCX boasts influences from the last few decades.

It isn’t so apparent as on other records (Sky Ferreira’s older Night Time, My Time comes to mind), nor is it as smart as a number of those records (Ferreira again). It’s better and smarter than it had any need to be, though, and it’s fun and feisty enough that the silliness of a clearly honest song like “London Queen” is forgivable. Resistance is futile. There are even a few remnants of True Romance Charli XCX for older fans (were we ever so young as 2013?), especially in the latter, less single-heavy half of the album.

I doubt SUCKER will break Aitchison through the way she hopes. I’m not sure she believes it will, either. That’s a shame, because she’s much more interesting than Trainor and other pop stars in the same mold. “Fancy” and “Boom Clap” have gotten her a foothold, though, and she’ll always have her place on the margins. She’s always been a bit too big for them, but sometimes the public just refuse to make space anywhere else.

SCORE: 8/10
Review written by Tyler Hanan

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Tyler Hanan

Tyler raves about movies on the Let The Right Films In podcast. Listen to him make jokes over his beleaguered cohost Kayla St. Onge and their more qualified guests who deserve so much better at soundcloud.com/ltrfipod. Find him on Twitter @tylerhanan.

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