Vroom Vroom Recordings\/Asylum2016<\/p>\n
“I released some of my favorite music in 2016,” Charli XCX recalled in a recent podcast interview when asked to weigh in on the viral 2016 nostalgia trend that permeated social media early this year. “I released a song and an EP called the Vroom Vroom EP.” Not a lot of artists make some of their best work at 23; even fewer veteran artists make their favorite work at that age. But thank goodness Charli loved Vroom Vroom, perhaps still her most polarizing entry in a catalog full of left turns. Somebody had to love Vroom Vroom.<\/p>\n
A couple of years before Vroom Vroom was released a decade ago today, Charli XCX \u2014 the daughter of a onetime club promoter in London \u2014 had already ascended the ranks from teenaged rave rat to radio hitmaker. Growing up, she remembers being the lone Spice Girls superfan in a sea of classic rock-admiring classmates, and her 2014 sophomore album Sucker was a fitting amalgamation of her primary influences up to that point: buzzing EDM synths, some Britpop-style guitars, and a Myspace party-girl snark. Sucker birthed hits like \u201cBreak The Rules\u201d and \u201cBoom Clap,\u201d songs that Charli has notably tried to distance herself from. Since Sucker\u2019s release, she hasn\u2019t shown a ton of interest in reflecting on the actual music comprising it \u2014 \u201cI\u2019ve been over it since we released it,\u201d she told i-D<\/a> in 2015 \u2014 but she knows some good came out of it. It was a crucial stop on the road to Vroom Vroom.<\/p>\n In that same i-D interview, Charli dropped a few glaring hints regarding Vroom Vroom. She\u2019d been listening to a lot of PC Music, A. G. Cook\u2019s proto-hyperpop music collective, and had been collaborating with one of its mainstays Sophie. Sophie, the late UK producer who was then still very much a purveyor of the underground, had garnered a cult following with songs like “Lemonade” and \u201cHey QT,\u201d the latter a one-off performance art\/recording project with Cook and fellow PC affiliate Hayden Dunham.\u00a0<\/p>\n Charli reached out to Sophie via cold call, and the two kicked off a few songwriting sessions in the first half of 2015, not long before Charli was slated to go on a co-headlining American tour with Jack Antonoff\u2019s Bleachers. The writing bug, evidently, got her good: Halfway through the tour Charli abruptly cancelled the rest of her appearances, expressing a desire to get back into the studio as soon as possible. \u201cI am struggling to create whilst I\u2019m on the road and that is making me unhappy,\u201d she wrote on Facebook. \u201cAs an artist I need to move quickly and write a lot to not feel restless. Sometimes touring really puts me in this isolated world where I feel down and sad but primarily I struggle to multitask and write songs at the same time which is what I need to do to feel OK.\u201d The decision paid off, and Vroom Vroom\u2019s title track arrived as a one-off single that October.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Charli has at numerous points in her career promised that her next move would be a surprising one, but that\u2019s probably never been truer than it was in the case of \u201cVroom Vroom.\u201d Though its on-the-nose exclamations of \u201clet\u2019s ride\u201d and \u201cbeep beep\u201d are unabashedly cheeky \u2014 particularly so in the case of Charli, whose discography since has offered plenty of petrolhead fodder \u2014 the subtly self-referential \u201cVroom Vroom\u201d was, in a way, the most authentic song Charli had released yet. \u201cI think my label got afraid, and I think a lot of people were confused,\u201d she told The Fader<\/a> at the time. \u201cBut\u2026 I just wanted to do that. That\u2019s the scene I came from when I was younger, that club scene. That\u2019s originally what I saw in Sophie, and I\u2019d never actually made music that was representative of that.\u201d<\/p>\n And a lot of people were confused by the Vroom Vroom rollout, indeed. Charli, whose collaborators up until Vroom Vroom still primarily skewed towards mainstream pop and big-name Swedish producers , entertained but befuddled audiences when she performed \u201cBoom Clap\u201d and \u201cHey QT\u201d in the same 2016 SXSW set with Sophie onstage beside her. Reviews for the EP were incredibly mixed: Some<\/a> affectionately likened it to the \u201cbubble-thrash\u201d noise of Sleigh Bells\u2019 beloved debut Treats, while others mistook its brashiness for soullessness. (When I started writing reviews for Pitchfork in 2019, a friend outside the industry half-jokingly asked me if there was any chance the publication would recant their 4.5\/10 score of the EP. A few years later, after author and eternal good sport Laura Snapes \u201cpublicly disavowed the nonsense [she] wrote about Vroom Vroom,\u201d they did just that<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Charli was one of many pop stars making clever, thoughtful music in the mid-2010s, but the brilliance of Vroom Vroom was in its fine print. You won\u2019t find much in the way of truly moving lyrics, but Charli\u2019s knack as a self-professed curator comes through in the EP\u2019s sound: The Hannah Diamond-featuring \u201cParadise\u201d is arguably the decade\u2019s most thrilling take on old-school Eurodance, the Pulp Fiction-sampling \u201cTrophy\u201d is an ultra-glossy, futuristic nod to dancehall beats, and the moody instrumental of \u201cSecret (Shh)\u201d is just a hop, skip, and jump away from the UK grime of Charli\u2019s youth. With Sophie at the production helm \u2014 keeping each track bold and impactful without ever spinning too far off the course \u2014\u00a0Vroom Vroom is a brief, but powerful test of pop music\u2019s boundaries.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Even skeptics of Vroom Vroom intuited that it would be impactful, seemingly concerned at what an EP full of purported vapidness, abrasive percussion, and vocals distorted into oblivion could mean for popular music at large. Perhaps critically, however, Vroom Vroom introduced the masses to Sophie and helped launch the subgenre we now know as hyperpop, which artists like 100 gecs and Jane Remover have since shaped into an ultra-online movement powered by maximalism and hedonism. Charli, meanwhile, would keep the party going at the clubs with 2017\u2019s one-two punch Number 1 Angel and Pop 2. 2020\u2019s how i\u2019m feeling now used the noise as a backdrop for COVID-isolated introspection, while Charli\u2019s 2024 opus Brat would find the harmony between the two sides. None of those albums, now pretty unanimously considered among the best in Charli\u2019s discography, would exist without the perplexing and messy road paved by Vroom Vroom. Our driver even warned us: If you couldn\u2019t get on board, you were just too slow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vroom Vroom Recordings\/Asylum2016 “I released some of my favorite music in 2016,” Charli XCX recalled in a recent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-502574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}