Trivia / Charli XCX

• Absurdly Short Production Time: how i'm feeling now was produced front-to-back in the span of six weeks following the start of COVID-19 Pandemic-induced lockdowns, and aside from "Party 4 U" (whose initial demo came from as early as 2017), all material was devised in that short period. As a point of personal reference, Charli had only been released 8 months prior, and that had been in the works for at least a year (not even counting the scrapped XCX World project).
• Approval of God: The song "Grins" off of True Romance was initially an instrumental track from 2011 by pop producer BloodPop (formerly known as Blood Diamonds) that Charli sang over and uploaded to SoundCloud without his permission. However, he was cool with it and let her put the song on the album.
• Black Sheep Hit: "Boom Clap" is an upbeat, energetic silly love song that you could safely play on any radio station or event with kids involved. It stands in stark contrast to her usual sarcastic, raunchy, profane, or avant pop-inspired output.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: While The Fault in Our Stars isn't a Box Office Bomb by any means (it was responsible for the song's initial rise up the charts), "Boom Clap" was originally written for the movie, later gained major success and later distanced itself from the film.
• Breakthrough Hit:
  • "Boom Clap" established her as a star in her own right. Before that she was just "that girl who sang the chorus to Fancy". And before that, the girl who sang alongside Icona Pop on "I Love It."
  • You could argue that "Fancy" was as big a breakthrough hit, as it was a massive #1 hit with a viral video and she sang the chorus, giving her the spotlight that "I Love It" didn't.
• Content Leak:
  • Suffered many back-to-back instances of this circa late 2017 after her Google Drive account was hacked, containing over 200 unreleased tracks, ranging from unmastered demos to release-ready tracks. It's widely believed that this is what ended up delaying her third studio album, forcing it to be rebooted in 2019 with Charli.
  • A separate instance of this occurred regarding her collaboration with Lil Peep, "Let U Down", which was originally slated to be on Pop 2 but was cut at the last minute following his passing. The song ended up being quietly uploaded by Tangerine Recordings onto their website in early 2019 — when it was discovered by Redditors a year later, it was suddenly taken down, suggesting that it was an accident.
• Creator Backlash:
  • She has described her album Sucker as having "felt fake" to her, saying that it was written less out of artistic integrity and more out of a desire to build on the chart success she had with "Fancy", her breakthrough collaboration with Iggy Azalea. Her subsequent work has been far more experimental, focused less on albums than on mixtapes.
  • While she didn't originally come up with the term, she also has a tenuous relationship with her being identified as a "hyperpop" artist. This isn't a comment based on the actual music per se, but rather her broadly disliking the label — in her words, she does not "identify with music genres".
  • She also doesn't think too highly of her first album, 14, recorded in 2006 when she was just, well, fourteen years old and released in 2008. She has called it "fucking terrible Myspace music" and "gimmicky dance tracks", and it has never gotten a rerelease.
• Creator Couple: Engaged to George Daniel, drummer for The 1975.
• Cut Song: While she isn't above the occasional tease or live performance, virtually all of her unreleased music during the ill-fated XCX World iteration of her third album is likely never to get an official release, mostly out of spite due to them being leaked in the first place. The only exceptions so far are "No Angel" (included as a B-side to the "Focus" single), "Girls Night Out" (released as its own single), and "Party 4 U" (greatly reworked as a track on how i'm feeling now).
• Development Hell: Charli had been teasing her third proper studio album since 2015, rumored to have been called XCX World, involving former collaborators like StarGate, SOPHIE, and BloodPop working production, with 2016's "After the Afterparty" being its first single. While she had since released an EP, two mixtapes, and many singles since, this specific project suffered countless delays despite Charli saying the album was effectively finished in early 2017, mostly thanks to both mass online leaks and her label interfering with releases. By late 2018, Charli made the decision to redo the entire thing from the ground-up, and Charli was finally announced with a late 2019 release date (notably, the tracklist doesn't appear to contain any previously-leaked tracks).
• Fan Community Nicknames: Her fans are called Angels. Yes, that makes them Charli's Angels.
• In Memoriam: Crash was dedicated to Charli's frequent collaborator SOPHIE, who passed away a year before the album's release.
• Missing Episode: She has a quite a lot of unreleased material, mostly only known through live performances and online leaks of demos, the most famous being her scrapped third album unofficially named XCX World.
• Newbie Boom:
  • Charli's collaborations with PC Music-related artists, from Vroom Vroom with SOPHIE, granted her a massive surge in popularity among indie/alternative pop and electronic circles. With each subsequent project, she's attracted more and more critical attention as being a codifier of the nascent Hyperpop subgenre alongside names like PC Music, 100 gecs, and Dorian Electra.
  • A smaller example came in the form of "Unlock It", a track from the Pop 2 mixtape in late 2017, which went viral out of nowhere on TikTok in early 2021. This prompted the creation of a visualizer almost 4 years after the song's release, and Charli herself decided to join in on the fun.
• No Budget: We don't have exact budget for it, but how i'm feeling now was largely created with a DIY-aesthetic in mind, with the music production featuring far less personnel than previous projects, and visuals being far more resource-friendly. To boot, the video of "claws" features Charli recording herself dancing to a greenscreen at home, and the cover art is a mundane camcorder selfie in a mirror.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: how i'm feeling now was also created with an ideal for fan collaboration in mind, with Charli regularly hosting public Zoom and Instagram meetings with fans during its production to share input, song ideas, and artwork. The biggest act of this was the music video for "forever", a montage of content submitted by fans who were asked to share various happy memories in video form.
• One-Hit Wonder: If we're counting solo performance, Charli's highest-charting mainstream radio hit was "Boom Clap", peaking at #8 of Billboard's Hot 100. She did, however, also have high-profile features in Iggy Azalea's "Fancy" (peaking at #1) and Icona Pop's "I Love It" (at #7).
• Permanent Placeholder: The song "claws" was named off the cuff as Charli was presenting various demos to fans in an Instagram meeting during the production of how i'm feeling now, with her still deciding its official title even as she slated it to be her second single for the album. She considered renaming it "I Like", but fans liked the name "claws" so much that it stuck.
• Production Posse: Charli is a major affiliate of PC Music, with nearly all of her projects since Vroom Vroom (which was primarily produced by fellow label affiliate SOPHIE) being produced with big names around the label including SOPHIE, A.G. Cook, easyFun, Danny L. Harle, and Life Sim. She could be considered an honorary PC Music act, especially since label head A.G. Cook became her creative director as of 2016.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The entirety of Charli's originally-planned third studio album, recognized by fans as XCX World^note Contrary to popular belief, while visual assets were leaked, the album had yet to be given a final name, and the XCX World title came entirely from fans, which was recorded and developed from between 2014-2017 and eventually set for a late 2017 release. Unfortunately, due to her infamous Content Leak and subsequent replacement with Charli, it's unlikely we'll be seeing a legitimate release of it or the songs that were likely planned for it any time soon.
  • Originally, the album Charli was meant to just be another mixtape to fill out a trilogy led by Number 1 Angel and Pop 2, as well as given a name based around the number 3 to round out the titles, but it was decided to expand it to being a proper album. She had also considered calling it Best Friends due to its feature-heavy nature.
  • "Gone" features the lyrics "I feel so unstable, fucking hate these people", which was originally supposed to be "I feel so unstable, fucking hate my label", although she specifies that she was actually on good terms with her label and thought the lyric would be funny.
  • Pop 2 was originally planned to have a song featuring Lil Peep titled "Let U Down", but was quietly cut out of respect following his death just a month before the mixtape's release.
  • The song "Official" almost didn't make it on Charli since she felt it was too much a "perfectly constructed pop song", and was worried about how listeners would react. She had to be convinced by both A.G. Cook and her label who both loved it to keep it on.
  • "Girls Night Out" was originally going to include a section sampling Aqua's "Barbie Girl" (with a refrain of "Come on Charli, let's go party"), which ended up not being included in the official version.
  • As seen from the public development process of how i'm feeling now on Twitter and Instagram, the album's tracklist went through a few different iterations. Songs titled "If I Cried" and "Breathe Out" were respectively performed in an Instagram story and her Candy Shop radio show, while two other tracks called "2hot" and "i hate all this gravity" were teased to be on the album but were cut in less than a week before release.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Despite the reverence fans have for it, Charli is disillusioned with her leaked XCX World-era work and has no interest in releasing them legitimately, finding them "tainted" despite liking the material.
  Charli: I was going to release that music, and I had really specific thoughts and ideas of how I would do it. It's just, the second it's been taken from you, it just doesn't even feel like yours anymore. That was really sad, because I'd put so much time into it, and money and love, and so had all the people who were working on it. Yeah, I had shot artwork and was about to shoot videos, and then it just kind of wasn't even mine anymore. So, RIP those days.
• Working Title: CRASH was originally going to be called Sorry If I Hurt You, but the word "crash" came to her one day, and after passing it around, she decided to make it the final title, as well as write a Title Track based on it. A song titled "Sorry If I Hurt You" would then feature on the album's deluxe edition.

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