The reports of the death of “brat summer” have been greatly exaggerated. Just when haters were declaring it had come to an end, Charli XCX supplied it with vital life support in the form of a “Guess” remix with none other than Billie Eilish.
Even casual observers could have guessed this was coming yesterday — and no, I won’t apologize for typing that. The British club queen posted a cryptic black-and-white photo on Instagram yesterday, simply captioned, “Guess ?” which alluded both to the brat bonus track of the same name and to the mysterious figure standing next to her. In the picture, Charli sports a tattoo on her lower back that, fittingly, reads “lower back tattoo,” her frilly underwear juxtaposed with her companion’s much more traditionally masculine digs, including what appears to be several pairs of layered boxers.
But we use the term “mystery” loosely, because the internet pretty much immediately deduced that it was Eilish, largely based on the signature silver rings on her fingers. Charli confirmed that on Thursday afternoon, posting a short preview of the video to Instagram fearing the two main pop girlies collapsing on a pile of underwear and revealing that it would be dropping in mere hours. And now, it’s finally here, in all its glorious excess.
Naturally, the full video is… a lot. In the best, most brat way possible. If anything, in retrospect it seems inevitable that we would have gotten a music video featuring Billie Eilish driving Charli XCX around on an enormous bulldozer as hundreds of pairs of underwear rain down on them from the heavens. From Eilish’s extremely flirty turn on Chicken Shop Date (because what says “sexual tension” like the sensual surrounds of… a British chicken shop) to her “so horny it’s almost camp” hit single, “Lunch,” of course the next logical step on this trajectory would be suggestively holding up bras in a Charli XCX video.
Even if brat summer does eventually draw to a close (what do you mean it’s August?!), it’s certainly going out with a bang. And I, for one, appreciate Eilish and XCX’s commitment to keeping the golden age of sapphic pop horniness going strong. Manifesting that the (alleged) Chappell Roan collab is the next to drop.
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