Number 1 Angel

At some point, the music world decided that Charli XCX doesn’t suit or want her new direction: that 2013’s True Romance was the true Charli, that 2014’s was Sucker an acceptable lark, that her PC Music collaborations were acts of desecration. Charli would disagree, probably while partying. In the past year, she has defended SOPHIE and co. in almost every interview—and while half of True Romance comprised immaculately tasteful dramatics, the other half was Charli karaoke-ing over Gold Panda tracks and collaborating with Brooke Candy. Before that, she was a MySpace kid drunk on Ed Banger Records. Charlotte Aitchison makes her own decisions, and if those decisions involve dystopian car sleaze, so be it.

A proper follow-up to Sucker has yet to materialize. So to apparent label consternation, Charli released Number 1 Angel as a nebulous—but increasingly common in pop—“project.” It’s not a proper mixtape (it isn’t free) nor an album (the stakes are lower, or that’s the hope), as the ever-prolific Aitchison rummages through the vaults to fill out a stopgap. Like Vroom Vroom, Number 1 Angel is produced by PC Music and affiliates, but this isn’t entirely their show.

The main difference between the True Romance era and 2017 is that Aitchison doesn’t write alone but with her peers, like MNDR (Feed Me Diamonds) and Sweden’s Noonie Bao (“Run Away With Me,” “I Could Be the One”). With Aitchison, they tone down PC Music’s worst habits—Tinkertoy takes on Eurotrance, two-dimensionalizing of women into storyboard dolls—and bridge their work with pop radio. The dovetailing is uncanny. While Aitchison’s said she doesn’t write about real-life heartbreak—making her the Diane Warren of teenage angst—the current of masochism that runs through her work runs exactly parallel to the anthemically undone women of EDM-pop today.

Number 1 Angel is best at its most vulnerable. On “Emotional,” Charli guiltily relishes an affair, plunging into a cavernous Patrik Berger track whose doomed joy would fit perfectly on True Romance. “3AM (Pull Up)” contains an entire emotional arc: a heroically lust-lorn “holding on” hook, an ill-advised booty call answered to perky trop-house, then the same perk used to shoo him away, however long that lasts. A.G. Cook can’t resist turning the last third of “Blame It On You” into a jock jam, but the rest nails the late-night desolation of letting oneself be played.

Sometimes the desolation is a bit much. “White Roses,” despite being a cool True Romance callback, is a dubious, desiccated, and over-obvious take on “The Rose.” When Charli sang about ecstasy on True Romance’s “Take My Hand,” it sounded like she was actually on ecstasy; here, “Drugs” says the word but sheds the high. It’s PC Music, so there’s a chance her dead-eyed “baby, you the love of my life/Selling all the drugs that I like” is just cynical, but it might as well be a D.A.R.E. commission to make drugs sound terrible.

The other novelty of Number 1 Angel and Charli’s past work is that it showcases, and is largely stolen by, a lot of guests. Starrah (“Needed Me”) and Raye (“All Cried Out”) carry themselves confidently on “Dreamer,” but a bit too confidently and interchangeably; the track comes off like three successive cuts of a Charli XCX demo that may not go to any of them. The otherwise delightful “Babygirl” exhumes trash-rapper Uffie from Charli XCX’s teenage dreams, and—maybe just from absence—she of all people steals the track away.

Sometimes the producers are at fault. The problem with emulating the likes of Britney’s Blackout is that fetishizing the vocalist as cipher comes with the territory. “Roll With Me,” produced by Robyn collaborator Klas Åhlund, perfectly channels the Swede in her cutesy-maniacal fembot phase—but like his song for Britney, “Piece of Me,” you sort of only can hear Robyn. On “Lipgloss,” Charli gets her QT on, vanishing into PC Music’s Alice-Deejay-at-Claire’s-but-sexy aesthetic. It features the rapper CupcakKe, who has too much personality and gleeful filth to be disappeared like she is. Her verse, zipping from iCarly shoutouts to the X-rated uses of pineapple, is a revelation. You could see all this as camaraderie: Charli, having sorta made it, helping others catch up. But the cost is hearing one of pop’s most vibrant young personalities consistently, disappointingly upstaged.