360

“360” is Brat’s mission statement delivered as a victory lap before the album has done anything to earn one — Charli XCX naming names (“Robyn, Lorde, Chloë and Emma,” “I’m the Charli XCX of…”) over an A. G. Cook and Cirkut production that sounds like a nightclub sound system being run slightly too hot on purpose. That’s the whole idea of Brat: not slick pop, but a scuffed, confident, up-all-night version of it, and “360” sells that concept in under three minutes flat.

The song is thin on incident by design — it’s a chant, not a narrative, and it survives almost entirely on the elasticity of A. G. Cook’s low end and the “I’m so Julia” ad-lib that turned into its own internet artifact. Charli doesn’t sing so much as declare, and the track leans into that flatness rather than fighting it, letting distortion and tempo do the emotional work a more conventional pop vocal would otherwise carry.

What’s remarkable in hindsight is how far that thin premise traveled: a Billboard Hot 100 top-50 placement is modest chart math for a song that ended up soundtracking a presidential campaign’s social media account, an “I’m so Julia” meme cycle, and eventually a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year — plus wins for the album elsewhere at the 67th Grammys, including Best Dance/Electronic Album. Very little of that was really about “360” as a song; it was about Brat as an aesthetic, and “360” is simply the track that got there first and loudest.

Judged purely as a piece of songwriting, it’s slight — a chorus and a flex, repeated with variations. Judged as an opening statement for a record that reoriented what “confident” was allowed to sound like in mainstream pop that year, it’s close to perfect. 8.0/10 — a song that knows exactly what it is and refuses to be anything more, which turns out to be the correct call.

Hero image: Charli XCX at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, May 16, 2025, by Harald Krichel, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.