Don’t let her chorus in Iggy Azalea’s disposable hit single “Fancy” fool you — Charli XCX is a top-tier pop star with balls bigger than any other. Although her first album 2013’s True Romance had all of the goods to break her into the mainstream it somehow failed to do so.
Thank god then for the quick turnaround of its followup because Charli built quite the hype machine for Sucker. Thanks to the chart dominance of “Fancy” and her own “Boom Clap” which received a boost from its inclusion in the teen tragedy The Fault in Our Stars she had one of the year’s biggest pop breakthroughs.
Sucker was reportedly first imagined as a pop-punk album and although I’d love to hear that whole thing I understand why Charli scrapped it. Well most of it. “London Queen” speeds through her experience “living the dream” with the thrashing synth-punk urgency of Atom & His Package. “Hanging Around” is equally as poppy-punky copping Joan Jett’s walloping beat from “I Love Rock & Roll” to give us her own jukebox anthem for loiterers.
The rest is more aligned with the dance-pop earworms of True Romance but where that album was built more around a Tumblr-cool “goth pop” nonchalance Sucker is a brassy and ballsy U-turn that gives a better sense of the type of artist Charli XCX wants to be (see the orgasmic hyper-vocalized bubblegum of “Need Ur Love”). She’s the sort of no-nonsense ass-kicker who starts her album with the chorus of “Fuck you sucker!”
