A defining moment in 2024 was “Brat summer,” the slime-green-coded cultural force inspired by the club-pop sounds and party girl vibes of Charli XCX’s monumental sixth album. Charli was just one of the pop stars to blow up and reach new levels of fame last year, but in the year since Brat’s success, the singer’s wider discography saw a notable halo effect that sets her apart from the rest.
Musically, of course, the impact of Brat alone on Charli’s career cannot be overstated: Her average weekly U.S. On-Demand Audio streams more than doubled, from 7.7 million in September 2023 to 20.9 million in September 2025, per Luminate CONNECT data, thanks to the album’s success and the ubiquity of Brat summer.
What we didn’t see coming was that Brat would jump-start a chain reaction. In 2025, several Charli songs, all released years before Brat, went viral on social media. “Party 4 u” from 2020 and 2017’s “Track 10” gained the most traction, but the increased attention on Charli’s pre-Brat work caused notable stream increases across her older discography that have continued through the year.
Specifically, Charli’s non-Brat songs saw a roughly 272% increase in U.S. ODA streams from January to May 2025.
But streaming data on similar artists to Charli suggests this outcome is actually pretty uncommon. As you’ll see in the chart below, following the release of their respective new albums last year, the high-profile female pop artists noted saw either little to no change or decreases in streams for their past work.
Charli, meanwhile, saw a 31% jump in her older songs in the eight weeks following Brat’s release — well before her older songs went viral — far outpacing other pop artists with major 2024 releases, such as Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish. Only Lady Gaga saw a similar trend with her back catalog following the release of her latest album, Mayhem, but even that was only a 5% increase.
These findings naturally beg the question: How did Charli pull off this halo effect?
The short answer is she is hardly a newcomer. Charli already had over a decade of critically praised work that garnered her a modest (compared with her post-Brat numbers) but passionate fanbase.
The more substantive explanation is that Brat was the culmination of Charli experimenting with her sound throughout her career, as she aimed to transform her music and advance the pop genre after her first two solid but conventional pop albums. See her album literally titled Pop 2 and the hyperpop cornerstone Vroom Vroom as evidence of her ambitions.
With Brat, Charli finally hit the bullseye between accessible pop hooks and experimental production. The album was not only a hit with her existing fans, but it connected with more audiences than any of Charli’s past work. Luckily for these millions of new Charli fans, they had over a decade of eclectic and acclaimed records to dig into.
Luminate artist data also found that 85% of U.S. Charli fans listen to more than their favorite artist’s big hits, and 77% like it when their favorite artist releases work outside of their usual genre (versus 73% and 53% of the general population, respectively). In other words, Charli’s fans particularly value both her experimentation and her large body of work.
Charli is continuing the ride the wave of stardom, with new music set to debut in Emerald Fennel’s big-screen Wuthering Heights adaptation, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, alongside her upcoming appearances in a whopping eight feature films, according to Luminate Film & TV data. It will be interesting to see if this unique phenomenon will continue thanks to her burgeoning film career.
In short, pulling off a Brat-style halo effect requires a strong and diverse back catalog, a willingness to constantly push your artistic boundaries and a lot of luck.
