Charli xcx

Myspace and the warehouses

Charlotte Emma Aitchison was born in Cambridge on 2 August 1992 and grew up in Start Hill, Essex. She began writing songs at 14 and took her stage name from her MSN Messenger screen name. Among the influences she has named are Britney Spears, Siouxsie Sioux, Kate Bush, Björk and Robyn, and when critics called her music hyperpop she rejected the term on social media, saying she does not identify with music genres. In early 2008 she started posting songs from an unreleased album called 14 on Myspace, which caught the attention of a promoter running illegal warehouse raves in East London. He invited her to perform, and she was billed on the flyers as Charli XCX. She later moved to London to study fine art at the Slade School of Fine Art, but left in her second year to focus on music.

She signed to Asylum Records in 2010. A two-hour session in Los Angeles with the producer Ariel Rechtshaid produced "Stay Away", and in 2011 Pitchfork gave both that single and "Nuclear Seasons" its Best New Track label.

A hit for someone else, then her own

In 2012 she co-wrote and sang on Icona Pop's I Love It, a track she has said she could not reconcile with her own sound. It reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 and, in June 2013, number one in the UK. She has also co-written for others, including Iggy Azalea's "Beg for It", Selena Gomez's "Same Old Love" and Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes's "Señorita". Her debut album True Romance came out on 12 April 2013 and peaked at number 85 in the UK.

In 2014 she was featured on Iggy Azalea's "Fancy", which topped the Hot 100, and gave the soundtrack of The Fault in Our Stars Boom Clap, her first solo top-ten single in the US. The song also appears on Sucker, her second album, released in December 2014.

PC Music, leaks and lockdown

From 2015 she began working with producers linked to the PC Music collective, and in July 2016 A. G. Cook became her creative director. The Vroom Vroom EP, mainly produced by Sophie, arrived in February 2016, followed by the mixtapes Number 1 Angel and Pop 2 in 2017. That year most of her planned third album leaked online and she scrapped it. The replacement, Charli, appeared in September 2019 with a long list of guests. In 2018 she had opened on Taylor Swift's Reputation Stadium Tour and released "1999" with Troye Sivan in October.

How I'm Feeling Now was written and recorded in six weeks of COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, with fans voting on lyric variations and cover art through Instagram. She followed it with Crash in 2022, a deliberate "major label sell-out" record that became her first UK number-one album.

Brat

She signed a new contract covering her next two albums in February 2023. That year "Speed Drive", from the Barbie soundtrack, entered the UK Singles Chart at number nine, and she co-composed the score of Bottoms with Leo Birenberg. On 22 February 2024 she played a Boiler Room set in Brooklyn titled PARTYGIRL, which drew about 37,000 RSVPs for 400 places. A week later came the first single, Von dutch, and on 7 June 2024 she released Brat. Its singles included 360 and Apple.

The album topped the UK chart after its remix album arrived in October, and reached number three in the US. Brat Summer followed: the Kamala Harris campaign adopted the lime-green aesthetic after Charli tweeted "kamala IS brat", though she later said it was not meant as an explicit endorsement, and Collins Dictionary named "brat" its word of the year. The album and its songs won three Grammys, including Best Dance/Electronic Album.

Wuthering Heights and after

In December 2024 the director Emerald Fennell asked her for one song for a film of Wuthering Heights. Charli and her collaborator Finn Keane turned it into a full companion record, recorded in rented studios while she toured Brat. Its lead single, House, featured the Welsh musician John Cale, and Wuthering Heights reached number one in the UK in February 2026. Her first produced film, The Moment, premiered at Sundance on 23 January 2026, and she followed the soundtrack with her eighth album, Music, Fashion, Film, on 24 July 2026.