London’s Charli XCX hopes to join the ranks of Taylor Swift, Lorde and Iggy Azealia with her major label debut, “Sucker.”
Whatap this year’s carrying capacity for young pop divas? Taylor Swift, Lorde and Iggy Azalea have been everywhere in 2014, filling the masses’ need for pop-pop, indie-pop and hip-pop, respectively.
But , aka Charlotte Emma Aitchison, doesn’t quite fit into any of those molds. A shade of punk and retro to a decade before she or her contemporaries were born, the London-born singer/songwriter is attempting to cut out a Charli XCX niche in a market that doesn’t exactly look to break the mold.
“Sucker,” her major label debut, has Charli XCX going her own way, both in theme and lyrical choices (Literally the first lyrics we hear, on the title track: “Said you want to bang / F*** you, sucker”), which suits her well. She pines often, as is customary on these sort of albums, but there’s the other side of the coin, too: “Everything was wrong with you / so breaking up was easy to do,” she sings on “Breaking Up” to a chorus of crunching electric guitars.
She seem an outsider—notably, she was a hit songwriter first—but itap worth noting that “Sucker” already has Aitchison shifting to the middle. The and charmed production of “True Romance” is gone without a trace, which flattens some of this album’s lesser tracks (“London Queen,” for one) into background fodder. But when it works, like on “Famous,” “Doing It” and the pulsating hit the studio advantage is without question a formidable part of her sound.
A necessary evil, maybe. “Sucker” is buoyed by the one-and-a-half hits that preceded its released, the triumphant “Boom Clap” and “Break The Rules,” her own version of “School’s Out.” It falls short of breaking Charli XCX through to the uppermost echelon of pop divas, but her sound and style don’t necessarily work there anyway. And thatap not a bad thing.
Follow our news and updates on , our relationship status on and our search history on . Or send us a telegram.
Dylan Owens is Reverb’s all-purpose news blogger and album reviewer. You can read more from him on , or the comment sections of WORLDSTARHIPHOP.
