If the song titles didn’t give it away, Brat Star’s hyper-referential writing takes a Letterboxd-native approach. Whether likening her process to Fincher’s notoriously tedious shoots (“We’ll do a thousand takes if that’s what it takes, anything for that body of work”) or typifying a certain strain of too-cool girl in “Margot Tenenbaum,” she commits to the idea that everyone’s life is a movie these days, and we’re all locked into some kind of bit. Loukeman, who mixed the record and nabs a couple co-production credits, proves a real asset to getting this across. His collagist approach to pop, electronic, and ambient helps guide Southern Ontario Gothic smoothly through its musical movements, so Brat Star can keep her head in clouds of hypothetical solipsism: “When I’m famous, I’ll barely have to exist for myself, because I’ll exist in everyone else’s head.”
For all her aspirations to cloutier pastures, she’s happiest reveling in down-home pleasures: a late-night dart in the parking lot, kissing your crush off a White Claw, looking up at the sky. She deals in a distinctly Canadian vibe that also permeates the music of Vancouver’s Sophia Stel, who just released her own debut. A mix of studied self-effacement and contentment in the now, it comes natural to an artist who grew up thinking of Toronto as the big city. “I just romanticized Toronto in a way maybe someone romanticizes Paris or New York,” Brat Star told Clairo in a recent conversation for Interview. It’s a sharp insight into how she manages to artfully toe the line between sincerity and sarcasm: She really does find beauty in the mundane.
Occasionally she flies too close to the sun, melting her signature into something more like schtick. The “Margot Tenenbaum” lyric “Insecure and pretty, it’s everyone’s problem” resonates on the track, less so engraved on accessories from the Paloma Wool fall collection. Sure, it’s comically full circle that a slightly hipper subset of the female fans envisioned on “Aritzia Sweater” can now dress for work in her disses, and since it’s no longer 1993, I’m not going to accuse a gal with a singular licensing deal of “selling out.” But it does reflect how outside of Brat Star’s hermetic diorama, some lines scan more like a corporation’s pandering tweets than natural vernacular. The Tom Tom Club-type groove on “Aritzia Sweater” can’t quite account for jargon like “face giving unalive,” “going nonverbal,” and “my soul’s on fleek,” AAVE-tinged Zoomerisms so overly parodied it’s almost punching down. “Dirty Hokas” draws a relatable connection between the titular sneaker and cushioning yourself from harsh reality, but it could do without the forced YSL lingo “slatts.”
