Charli XCX looks right at me and waves as her mouth twists into a wry grin. I’d like to think it was my dancing, or my outfit, or my very good new haircut, but it’s probably the disposable camera in my hand. I’d just raised it above the crowd like a flare gun. One last shot in the roll, and it’s her, looking directly into the lens, looking directly at me.

I watch back my video of the moment. Ephemera I’ve managed to wrangle out of the cultural zeitgeist, manifest into this single, temporary moment with her — with everyone around us.

It is a chilly Thursday at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York. Late Wednesday, I’d randomly propositioned my editor with a wild pitch: drive the three hours to the semi-remote set of sculptural marvels the next day and figure out what, if anything, Charli XCX had planned. She’d announced the pop-up in the most casual way, like the Brat billboards back in June, during Pride, or the lackadaisical drop of the deluxe album soon after the original: “nyyyyyyy i want to play you my new album 🙂 shall we go upstate ?”

A press pass was soon secured, as was a rough travel plan. It was nearly midnight, and I ran by the 24/7 CVS to pick up more film, and a Celsius for the road, and eventually fell into a fitful four hours of sleep. The last thing I remember, before drifting off, was repeating a particular line from the “360” remix featuring Robyn and Yung Lean in my head: “I started so young we didn’t even have email/ Now my lyrics on your boobies.” So fucking true, and then the darkness.

Fall colors were underway as I hit the road, signaling the melancholy and transitory period of fall when, like spring, the world shifts ever so carelessly towards what’s next. Winter is most often accused of freezing things in time. But Brat Summer, for all the energy and momentum and travel and change it brought into my life, was similarly frozen. A single moment strung together by a strobe light. I think back to a particular Brat night I wrote about, earlier this summer. My clothes were plastered to my skin with sweat, and my friends felt both melded to me and a million miles away. Even the dance floor itself felt balanced on a razor’s edge, yet there we all were, pushing our hair back and bumpin’ that. It’s almost silly, to look back at now, seeing as that single night began a chain effect that propelled me to parties on both coasts — even internationally. 365 party girl: “I never go home, don’t sleep, don’t eat. Just do it on repeat, keep bumpin’ that.”

An hour or so out the scenery changed, and the incomplete Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat remix album looped back around on itself to the “360” remix. The complete tracklist had been public for a week at that point, and I laughed, thinking about the various wishlist collaborators people would chant for, or the scorn from younger fans when faces like Julian Casablancas or The Japanese House or even Bon Iver emerged on the tracklist. Why not so and so? Where’s this and that? From my estimation — later proven, by various monologues that accompany the listening party to come — Charli is broadly disinterested in what the album should have been. Or even what it must have been. Brat, by her own admissions both in the lyrics and offline, is an album about doing whatever she wants, with the people she feels like doing it with. Label expectations and chart performance and commercial viability be damned. Very Brat, after all.

A line has formed outside Storm King Art Center, and I’m interviewing dozens of fans who cheekily admit Brat was their first offering from the British pop savant. Inevitably, one youngster pipes up from the bunch to take charge of their friends, saying they’d been a believer since Pop 2, or theVroom Vroom EP, or Sucker, and most rarely, True Romance. I don’t wish to presume, or impose, but I’ve met plenty of gay people in my life, and I’ll leave the inference on the dynamics of these friend groups to interpretation. Closer to the entrance, beleaguered music journalists and TikTokers mill about as the guest list situation is sorted. I laugh as I watch a handful of notable TikTokers delicately broach if there’s a “special entrance” just for them. There is not, but they’re soon ushered in with the rest of us, and herded onto specially reserved trams.

I opt to walk, wanting to experience the moment on the ground and not from the comfort of a crowded bus of Internet personalities making content about fall leaf colors. A Vitamin Water pop-up is handing out Brat green flavors. I take one, and almost gag, the flavor being a mix of various synthetic substances that produce the distinct taste of a powder I once experienced, after it’s been dislodged from the nose. I finish it anyway, nearly choking from the laugh welling up inside me again. The scenery has opened up, sprawling fields filled with sculptural marvels dotted with various Brat signifiers. A green wig. A TikTok-ready outfit. An influencer with a selfie stick. Gaggles of girls and gays, arm in arm, stomping towards the unknown. I passively hit my vape and fall back in line with friends I’d run into on the way, filling them in on all they missed since Brat Summer caused me to fall off the earth.

What is it Yung Lean says on the remix? “Mansion, castle, pets, family, lights, camera, action?” That’s about the gist.

The giant vinyl installation comes into view, shaped like a classic gatefold LP In signature Brat green. Along the path are various vendors, free of charge, peddling drinks and food and limited t-shirts to commemorate the popup. We grab a giant pizza and head to the greens, slowly inching our way forward until I’m all but five feet from her DJ booth. Perfect. Over the next twenty or so minutes, the crowd spontaneously erupts into cheers as a random person with a shockingly similar haircut to Charli is spotted over and over again to the booth’s right. I spot her creative collaborator Terrence O’Connor, and elsewhere, O’Connor’s fiancé, TikToker Benito Skinner. Likely place for him to be. The crowd closest to the booth is a who’s who of press and New York socialites and the sort most likely to tweet that they should have been in the “360” video over so-and-so.

Understand I implicate myself, just for making note of the faces, or being there at all.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition in the world of Charli XCX, evidenced by the frequent discourse her parties create about access and internet celebrity. The tension between “real fans” — however recent — and the pop star’s extended celebrity network has never been more manifest than this year. And here they all are, upstate on a Thursday, jostling about each other and sharing weed and other substances, even across clout gaps. Beautiful, really, and I smile, squinting into the sun and feeling it all over my face. A cheer erupts again and I snap back, knowing this time it’s her.

She’s dressed in a penny lane coat and washed jeans, tight t-shirt highlighting her lack of a bra. Our shared signature. She jokes that this whole thing is nothing really, nor does she have much planned, half-expecting nobody to show up at all. Irony, of course, but she does proceed to play the first song on her phone and clamber up onto the booth. The rest of the experience proceeds at about the same pace, except when she pauses to talk, and then pauses again, to joke that she didn’t want to talk at all.

Standouts from the following tracklist include the brooding cover of “Everything is romantic,” on which Caroline Polachek pensively tells Charli: “It’s like you’re living the dream, but you’re not living your life.” Like the album itself, which tackles Charli’s often turbulent feelings about her career, the remix album often concerns itself with her turbulent feelings about Brat. A remix album responding to itself, tracing a line through time as her world changes quite rapidly — all of us in the audience included. The “Sympathy is a knife” remix with Ariana Grande drives the point in like the metaphorical knife: “When somebody says, ‘Charli, I think you’ve totally changed,; it’s a knife when somebody says they like the old me and not the new me, and I’m like, ‘Who the fuck is she?’”

Deep into the experience, one particular diatribe sticks with me. She’s talking about the infinite possibilities of dance music. “When the song comes out, when you make the song, there’s still so many different versions of that song that could be made.” She is interrupted by a drone flying by, and asks us to wave to Twitch, where the party is being live-streamed. “That was so cute,” she says, and then she continues with her aside: “Why not? Why be like, ‘It’s the album and it’s done?’”

A simple motto, but it undergirds the entire ethos of the Brat era. Really, Charli’s entire career. Collaboration is key to her cult iconography, projects like Pop 2 and Number One Angel serving mostly as vehicles to work with friends, or icons, or her favorite collaborators. The remix album is no different, and as she says, is about the idea that music is not fixed in stone. Songs do not remain frozen in amber, nor are they immutable. None less so than dance music, itself as fleeting as the wind whipping all around us.

So there I am again, at the beginning again. Frozen in a moment with Charli as she smiles right at me, through me. She ends on the “Girl, so confusing” remix, and we all scream “Girl, you walk like a bitch” at the art around us. A prayer maybe, to the unknowable Storm King. I watch the footage back again as I walk back to my car, remembering her smile is similarly preserved on a 35mm roll of film in my coat pocket. I pause as the melancholy of fall washes over me; it is all changing again, and there will never be another moment like this, not in her career or mine. The world is different all at once, changed like the songs on Brat, changed like the seasons. Nothing lasts forever, and nothing stays the same. Why not? I hear her again. “Why be like, ‘It’s the album, and it’s done?’”

Thank god, or the Storm King, for the changes then.

Photography: Henry Redcliffe