\u201cLet\u2019s ride.\u201d This is the command that opened up Vroom Vroom ten years ago, and if you let yourself into Charli XCX\u2019s lavender Lamborghini, you were in for three minutes of pop\u2019s most exhilarating ride. A robo-charged synth purring \u201cVroom vroom\u201d incessantly: was it a revving engine that\u2019d been distorted to sound like a melody, or a human voice that\u2019d been re-cast in platinum and chrome? But perhaps the man-versus-machine distinction didn\u2019t matter so much; after all, as you continued listening to \u201cVroom Vroom,\u201d it was clear that, for all its legible signifiers of cars and highways\u2014roaring engines, squealing wheels, burning rubber\u2014nothing about it evoked a ride from this world. The screeching synths might sound, plausibly, like wheels peeling down a freeway at a buck-forty, yet something about them felt too wobbly, too slippery; if anything, they sounded more like wheels careening down some 5-D racetrack, highways looping around in some M\u00f6bius strip configuration we\u2019d never known. The track was worlds away from the pop Charli XCX\u2014or really anyone\u2014had made up until that point; perhaps the only connective tissue was the chorus, a delightfully simple bit about being a sexy girl with a car, giddy and chewy enough to awake a sleeper cell of party gays and girls wherever it was played.<\/p>\n
Observing Charli XCX\u2019s career trajectory has often felt a bit like watching a character in one of those choose-your-own-adventure video games. You can imagine her, at every turning point, as a tiny pixellated character hovering before an 8-bit dialogue box with two options: remain an underground pop diva, or make a bid for main pop girl? At the end of 2014, the English pop artist found herself at a familiar crossroads once again. She\u2019d released True Romance in 2013, a moody alt-pop debut that was critically beloved but failed to cross over into mainstream success. At the same time, \u201cI Love It,\u201d the track she\u2019d written for Swedish duo Icona Pop, had blown up; 2014\u2019s \u201cFancy\u201d and \u201cBoom Clap\u201d soon followed suit, providing Charli with her first chart-topping and solo top-ten hit, respectively. The moment seemed like Charli\u2019s to seize: hot off the streak of some smash successes, she could catapult herself into pop\u2019s upper echelons. But when 2014\u2019s Sucker<\/a> came and went, yet another critical darling that failed to make a dent in the charts, Charli began reconsidering the whole \u201cpop stardom\u201d thing that would require her to continue down the Sucker route, chasing more chart points.<\/p>\n Besides, it just wasn\u2019t the type of music Charli XCX wanted to be making. Charli wanted to party. (As she would later go on to tell us: \u201cI wanna dance to me \/ When I go to the club.\u201d) Here was, after all, the girl who\u2019d gotten her start performing songs like \u201cDinosaur Sex\u201d (the hook: \u201cT-Rex! Dinosaur sex! \/ T-Rex! Dinosaur sex!\u201d) at East London warehouse parties when she was just 14; who\u2019d played her first rave at 15, dressed in a blond wig, huge white sunglasses, and a black and yellow leotard; who\u2019d posted tracks like \u201cArt Bitch\u201d and \u201c!Franchesckaar!\u201d on her MySpace. At the end of Sucker, Charli realized that she wanted to return to the club scene, the world she\u2019d come from: \u201cI was like, \u2018Uh, what am I doing?\u2019 If I make a party record, I can go on tour and party every night,\u201d she said in a FADER profile. So, instead of vying for chart success again, Charli chose to dive off the deep end into experimental pop. It was the choice that would cement her as a legend, first in alternative pop and then, eventually, mainstream pop, once it caught up.<\/p>\n Vroom Vroom marked Charli XCX\u2019s first collaboration with the late English producer SOPHIE, whose work on the EP would ultimately define both Charli\u2019s sound and the larger hyperpop arena to come. At the time, SOPHIE was heavy in London\u2019s underground scene, DJing and working alongside London label PC Music. Throughout 2013 and 2014, she\u2019d released a string of mind-melting singles\u2014including \u201cBIPP,\u201d \u201cELLE,\u201d \u201cHARD,\u201d and \u201cLEMONADE\u201d\u2014yet remained alluringly, frustratingly enigmatic: no one knew how she looked, where she came from, or even what gender she was. When a journalist tried getting SOPHIE to define her music genre in a rare 2014 interview, she simply responded, \u201cAdvertising.\u201d (A year later, McDonald\u2019s licensed \u201cLEMONADE\u201d for an ad about, you guessed it, lemonade. Advertising indeed.) Charli had become a fan after then-boyfriend Huck Kwong put her on to an early SoundCloud demo of \u201cLEMONADE,\u201d and in 2015, while organizing a writing camp in Sweden for a new album, she decided to cold-email SOPHIE and invite her out.<\/p>\n When the two finally met in person, the chemistry was instantaneous. For a girl that\u2019d grown up on Ed Banger label, Uffie, Sebastien, and Justice tracks, Charli gravitated right away towards SOPHIE\u2019s vision of electronic music that could be hard yet progressive. SOPHIE was also uniquely capable of bringing Charli\u2019s most forward-thinking sonic ideas to life: in a Vogue interview, Charli said, \u201cI felt like I\u2019d been trying to make a song that sounded like \u2018Vroom Vroom\u2019 for forever, but I couldn\u2019t do it because I hadn\u2019t met anybody who had the skills to make the sound. When I met SOPHIE, it was like: \u2018Wow, you get it, and you get me, and you also make me feel something.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n SOPHIE, likewise, saw an immediate collaborator in Charli. Charli\u2019s voice was the rare one muscular enough to sit atop a SOPHIE production fully intact without being consumed by whip-clang electronica; in fact, the two played off each other perfectly, the raw physicality of Charli\u2019s delivery highlighting what made SOPHIE\u2019s brazenly synthetic soundscapes shine, and vice versa. The duo worked fast in the studio, constantly playing catch up to the other\u2019s crushed-caffeine-pills mania of ideas: \u201cWe\u2019ll do three or four songs in a few hours and we\u2019ll be like, \u2018next one, next one\u2026\u2019\u201d SOPHIE said in a Crack Magazine profile. Vroom Vroom was recorded in a mere three days, and the EP still maintains that easy confidence and don\u2019t-overthink-it charm of throwing ideas at the wall and trusting your first instincts.\u00a0<\/p>\n SOPHIE\u2019s production is what Vroom Vroom is most remembered for, and even a decade later, it still sounds like pop music\u2019s future. Here were sounds that appeared not to be produced in any studio or audio software known to mankind, but perhaps catalyzed in a chemical lab: substances that ignored all atomic properties, simultaneously titanium-hard and zippy as a toy, fizzing giddily through the air and clanging and banging before boiling into bulbous bubblegum and silicone goop. Hard clang snares and cheery twinkles, Charli\u2019s helium-pumped voice, synths that felt possessed by windshield wipers; throughout the EP, SOPHIE was constantly charting out an ecstatic, ambitious roadmap for what pop could be. The sheer novelty and childish inventiveness of her sounds remains revolutionary, as if you\u2019ve stumbled across alien transmissions and suddenly unlocked a new frequency range you can hear.<\/p>\n While the title track easily remains Vroom Vroom\u2019s most iconic part, the rest of the EP\u2019s slim four tracks each offer up their own alternating, idiosyncratic visions of pop. \u201cParadise\u201d loops in PC Music princess Hannah Diamond for a rave-y ballad of hopecore butterflies, rainbows, and pink and white paradises. (Hannah Diamond had actually been Charli\u2019s first introduction to PC Music; Charli first learned of her after someone posted \u201cPink and Blue\u201d on a Yung Lean forum.) Charli and Hannah Diamond\u2019s voices are striking in their youthful, hopeful clarity, yet it\u2019s the drop\u2014speckled with SOPHIE\u2019s warped, squelchy synths that sound like suction cups and pop sockets being played like bongo drums\u2014that offers the ecstatic, otherworldly vision of bliss. \u201cTrophy,\u201d meanwhile, interpolates a Pulp Fiction sample to create what ultimately sounds like a demented high school cheerleader pep rally chant.\u00a0<\/p>\n All booming chants and drum claps, you can imagine girls soaring through the air, skirts and ponytails flying, as they stack themselves into SOPHIE\u2019s dream-world shapes of Penrose triangles and M.C. Escher cubes. When Charli yells \u201cThrow it up! Throw it up!,\u201d her bratty yet military drill sergeant-sharp delivery is that of a dictatorial, bubblegum-popping, queen bee cheerleader determined to win at any cost. EP closer \u201cSecret (Shh)\u201d\u2019s drop of wubby, hydraulic bass opens up like a quicksand pit in the middle of the song, threatening to suck all its surroundings into its bottomless vortex; accompanying high-pitched screeches merely seem to soundtrack the unfortunate souls being sucked into this well of desire. This is no simple secret; rather, this is all-consuming lust, a desire so destabilizing and disorienting it nearly demands you as sacrifice. When paired with its feverish lyrics\u2014\u201cI\u2019m ready to climb the walls\u201d and \u201cI feel like an animal on all fours\u201d\u2014you can see Charli as the unhinged lover, scaling the walls like a spider.\u00a0<\/p>\n Vroom Vroom clocks in at a mere 12 minutes, yet those 12 minutes would go on to change the course of pop, heralding the ascendant scene of 2020\u2019s hyperpop. When 2024\u2019s brat<\/a> rolled around, Charli had already spent years in the fast lane. (And in many ways, the Crash to brat pipeline mirrored the Sucker to Vroom Vroom conversion that\u2019d taken place almost a decade prior.) By the time the mainstream embraced Brat Summer<\/a>\u2014where Charli was finally able to actualize both experimental pop credo and chart success\u2014it was clear that she was speeding away again, sun roof open and middle finger out the window. But can\u2019t you see? After all, she\u2019s cute, sexy, and her ride\u2019s sporty. And you know that you can\u2019t catch her.\u00a0<\/p>\n