Looking back on the year she's had, it's hard to believe that the phrase "Charli XCX, mainstream pop force" was nothing but daydream fodder for the pop cognoscenti little more than a year ago. Forged in the late-'00s crucible of the MySpace music scene and signed to a label when most people are trying to get through high school, Charlotte Aitchison was a critical darling long before she was a chart presence: after leaving a scrappy self-recorded debut in the dust, early singles like "Stay Away" and "Nuclear Seasons" picked up plaudits but failed to dent the conversation of casual pop fans. It took the surprise explosion of "I Love It"—a demo she tossed to Swedish party gremlins Icona Pop on a whim, and helped to sing—into an international hit to generate the momentum required for her first full-length, True Romance. An amalgamation of her best singles to date and some sterling new material, the album sated critics again but came and went without leaving any sort of commercial impression.
After peppy advance single "SuperLove" landed with a thud at the end of 2013, Charli found herself in a familiar position: beloved by pop Twitterati and devoted fans, but lacking the sort of chart firepower many felt her talent warranted. By the summer of 2014, the script had flipped: with assists from rapping Australian supernova Iggy Azalea and a soundtrack spot on teen drama The Fault in Our Stars, she had credits on the defacto Song of the Summer (the former's "Fancy") and her own solo top 10 hit, the swooning "Boom Clap". Sucker is her second studio album, and perhaps the years of hard work and compositional refinement it took to reach the top helped to shape the record's uncompromising sensibility; this is an album that seeks to bend the mainstream to its will rather than conform to its reigning trends. And in a bold display of self-confidence and strength of personality, it operates under the premise that Charli is a viable star even though the record will ultimately constitute a referendum on the validity of that assumption.
There's a great deal of volatility to Charli's writing and artistic growth, and it shows in both her evolution leading up to Sucker and the sound of the album itself. Her great early singles were glittering and booming and a little desperate, wrapped up in love in all of its life-or-death glory; on cuts like "So Far Away", she sunk into swooning, gaseous dreamscapes. By the end of the period covered by True Romance, she had moved on to brash anthems for cool cheerleaders like "I Love It" and "SuperLove"; disillusioned with the music industry in the time leading up to Sucker, she decamped to Sweden with producer pal Patrik Berger (whose credits are all over the finished product) and put together an unreleased roaring punk record that's already entered into the annals of pop myth. Imagine a world where the boisterous onomatopoeic chant that kicks off "Boom Clap" is sped up and made the whole song, and it's an even bigger hit somehow; that's the world of Sucker.