Charli XCX's How I'm Feeling Now Deserved The Love Brat Is Getting
This album was way too slept on.
When Charli XCX unveiled the set list for her Sweat Tour, something was very noticeably missing. With no songs featured from her 2020 album How I’m Feeling Now, the absence felt like a knife to the pop star’s longtime fans, especially considering how sonically, visually, and aesthetically connected the overlooked album is to her culture-shifting 2024 release Brat.
Sure, How I’m Feeling Now got some critical acclaim, but broadly, it remained a project by and for the Angels, Charli’s tight-knit fan community. That was largely due to the pandemic, as Charli would host intimate Zoom calls with fans to play demos and suss out song titles. This DIY nature may have kept the album from blowing up to more mass appeal, but now that Brat has catapulted Charli to true A-list status, it’s high time its moody sibling got the respect it deserves.
In many ways, How I’m Feeling Now was the proto-Brat. On songs like “Pink Diamond,” Charli experiments with woozy, disorienting beats and chants about how she’s going to “go real hard” at a rave — a worthy precursor to Brat’s partying anthems “Von Dutch” and “Club Classics.”
But the real through-line between the albums is the pathos buried beneath the noisy synths. The head-over-heels yearning in HIFN’s “Detonate” is a perfect lead-in to Brat’s “Talk Talk,” and only Charli can capture the pure euphoria of true love with a wildly overpowering beat and hypnotic chant like she does in “Claws” and again in “Everything Is Romantic.”
Both albums feature therapeutic breakthroughs that you can dance to in “I Finally Understand” and “Apple,” and cut-your-heart-open love songs in “Party 4 U” and “I Might Say Something Stupid.”
Charli herself recently called Brat and How I’m Feeling Now “siblings” in an Oct. 8 interview. It’s easy to hear how the 2020 release led Charli into a Brat direction — especially after the drop of the remix album Brat and It's Completely Different but Also Still Brat. On HIFN, Charli’s music was more introspective and romantic — most of the songs are dedicated to her then-partner Huck Kwong. While they still leaned into the experimental beats and hyper-descriptive lyricism that Brat is known for, Charli was singing about love more than partying.
How I’m Feeling Now is the softer, older sister to Brat. She’s still at the rave, but she’s cuddled up with her BF in the corner and not in the moshpit.
That makes sense considering this is an album made in the pandemic. For the first time, Charli was kept away from her beloved parties, and instead was spending 24/7 with her boyfriend. It’s an incubator that made How I’m Feeling Now the softer, older sister to Brat. She’s still at the rave, but she’s cuddled up with her BF in the corner and not in the moshpit.
But Brat and It's Completely Different but Also Still Brat is completely HIFN-coded. With nearly every remix, Charli sands down Brat’s brattiness to reveal, well, how she’s really feeling now. Lorde says it best on the “Girl, So Confusing” remix: “Inside the icon / There's still a young girl from Essex.” Brat was the icon at work, and the remixed album is the inner Charli channeling her How I’m Feeling Now days.
If Brat is a night at the club, the remixes are the dizzy walk home as your mind starts to shift to the heavy stuff, and HIFN is laying down in your bed blearily thinking about life.
The albums exist in conversation with each other — there’s a larger story to Brat that you can’t fully get without some familiarity with How I’m Feeling Now. Charli may be the green queen now, but never forget that she was a pink diamond first.
