“Let’s ride.” This is the command that opened up Vroom Vroom ten years ago, and if you let yourself into Charli XCX’s lavender Lamborghini, you were in for three minutes of pop’s most exhilarating ride. A robo-charged synth purring “Vroom vroom” incessantly: was it a revving engine that’d been distorted to sound like a melody, or a human voice that’d been re-cast in platinum and chrome? But perhaps the man-versus-machine distinction didn’t matter so much; after all, as you continued listening to “Vroom Vroom,” it was clear that, for all its legible signifiers of cars and highways—roaring engines, squealing wheels, burning rubber—nothing about it evoked a ride from this world. The screeching synths might sound, plausibly, like wheels peeling down a freeway at a buck-forty, yet something about them felt too wobbly, too slippery; if anything, they sounded more like wheels careening down some 5-D racetrack, highways looping around in some Möbius strip configuration we’d never known. The track was worlds away from the pop Charli XCX—or really anyone—had made up until that point; perhaps the only connective tissue was the chorus, a delightfully simple bit about being a sexy girl with a car, giddy and chewy enough to awake a sleeper cell of party gays and girls wherever it was played.
Observing Charli XCX’s career trajectory has often felt a bit like watching a character in one of those choose-your-own-adventure video games. You can imagine her, at every turning point, as a tiny pixellated character hovering before an 8-bit dialogue box with two options: remain an underground pop diva, or make a bid for main pop girl? At the end of 2014, the English pop artist found herself at a familiar crossroads once again. She’d released True Romance in 2013, a moody alt-pop debut that was critically beloved but failed to cross over into mainstream success. At the same time, “I Love It,” the track she’d written for Swedish duo Icona Pop, had blown up; 2014’s “Fancy” and “Boom Clap” soon followed suit, providing Charli with her first chart-topping and solo top-ten hit, respectively. The moment seemed like Charli’s to seize: hot off the streak of some smash successes, she could catapult herself into pop’s upper echelons. But when 2014’s Sucker came and went, yet another critical darling that failed to make a dent in the charts, Charli began reconsidering the whole “pop stardom” thing that would require her to continue down the Sucker route, chasing more chart points.
Besides, it just wasn’t the type of music Charli XCX wanted to be making. Charli wanted to party. (As she would later go on to tell us: “I wanna dance to me / When I go to the club.”) Here was, after all, the girl who’d gotten her start performing songs like “Dinosaur Sex” (the hook: “T-Rex! Dinosaur sex! / T-Rex! Dinosaur sex!”) at East London warehouse parties when she was just 14; who’d played her first rave at 15, dressed in a blond wig, huge white sunglasses, and a black and yellow leotard; who’d posted tracks like “Art Bitch” and “!Franchesckaar!” on her MySpace. At the end of Sucker, Charli realized that she wanted to return to the club scene, the world she’d come from: “I was like, ‘Uh, what am I doing?’ If I make a party record, I can go on tour and party every night,” she said in a FADER profile. So, instead of vying for chart success again, Charli chose to dive off the deep end into experimental pop. It was the choice that would cement her as a legend, first in alternative pop and then, eventually, mainstream pop, once it caught up.
Vroom Vroom marked Charli XCX’s first collaboration with the late English producer SOPHIE, whose work on the EP would ultimately define both Charli’s sound and the larger hyperpop arena to come. At the time, SOPHIE was heavy in London’s underground scene, DJing and working alongside London label PC Music. Throughout 2013 and 2014, she’d released a string of mind-melting singles—including “BIPP,” “ELLE,” “HARD,” and “LEMONADE”—yet remained alluringly, frustratingly enigmatic: no one knew how she looked, where she came from, or even what gender she was. When a journalist tried getting SOPHIE to define her music genre in a rare 2014 interview, she simply responded, “Advertising.” (A year later, McDonald’s licensed “LEMONADE” for an ad about, you guessed it, lemonade. Advertising indeed.) Charli had become a fan after then-boyfriend Huck Kwong put her on to an early SoundCloud demo of “LEMONADE,” and in 2015, while organizing a writing camp in Sweden for a new album, she decided to cold-email SOPHIE and invite her out.
When the two finally met in person, the chemistry was instantaneous. For a girl that’d grown up on Ed Banger label, Uffie, Sebastien, and Justice tracks, Charli gravitated right away towards SOPHIE’s vision of electronic music that could be hard yet progressive. SOPHIE was also uniquely capable of bringing Charli’s most forward-thinking sonic ideas to life: in a Vogue interview, Charli said, “I felt like I’d been trying to make a song that sounded like ‘Vroom Vroom’ for forever, but I couldn’t do it because I hadn’t met anybody who had the skills to make the sound. When I met SOPHIE, it was like: ‘Wow, you get it, and you get me, and you also make me feel something.’”
SOPHIE, likewise, saw an immediate collaborator in Charli. Charli’s voice was the rare one muscular enough to sit atop a SOPHIE production fully intact without being consumed by whip-clang electronica; in fact, the two played off each other perfectly, the raw physicality of Charli’s delivery highlighting what made SOPHIE’s brazenly synthetic soundscapes shine, and vice versa. The duo worked fast in the studio, constantly playing catch up to the other’s crushed-caffeine-pills mania of ideas: “We’ll do three or four songs in a few hours and we’ll be like, ‘next one, next one…’” SOPHIE said in a Crack Magazine profile. Vroom Vroom was recorded in a mere three days, and the EP still maintains that easy confidence and don’t-overthink-it charm of throwing ideas at the wall and trusting your first instincts.
SOPHIE’s production is what Vroom Vroom is most remembered for, and even a decade later, it still sounds like pop music’s future. Here were sounds that appeared not to be produced in any studio or audio software known to mankind, but perhaps catalyzed in a chemical lab: substances that ignored all atomic properties, simultaneously titanium-hard and zippy as a toy, fizzing giddily through the air and clanging and banging before boiling into bulbous bubblegum and silicone goop. Hard clang snares and cheery twinkles, Charli’s helium-pumped voice, synths that felt possessed by windshield wipers; throughout the EP, SOPHIE was constantly charting out an ecstatic, ambitious roadmap for what pop could be. The sheer novelty and childish inventiveness of her sounds remains revolutionary, as if you’ve stumbled across alien transmissions and suddenly unlocked a new frequency range you can hear.
While the title track easily remains Vroom Vroom’s most iconic part, the rest of the EP’s slim four tracks each offer up their own alternating, idiosyncratic visions of pop. “Paradise” loops in PC Music princess Hannah Diamond for a rave-y ballad of hopecore butterflies, rainbows, and pink and white paradises. (Hannah Diamond had actually been Charli’s first introduction to PC Music; Charli first learned of her after someone posted “Pink and Blue” on a Yung Lean forum.) Charli and Hannah Diamond’s voices are striking in their youthful, hopeful clarity, yet it’s the drop—speckled with SOPHIE’s warped, squelchy synths that sound like suction cups and pop sockets being played like bongo drums—that offers the ecstatic, otherworldly vision of bliss. “Trophy,” meanwhile, interpolates a Pulp Fiction sample to create what ultimately sounds like a demented high school cheerleader pep rally chant.
All booming chants and drum claps, you can imagine girls soaring through the air, skirts and ponytails flying, as they stack themselves into SOPHIE’s dream-world shapes of Penrose triangles and M.C. Escher cubes. When Charli yells “Throw it up! Throw it up!,” her bratty yet military drill sergeant-sharp delivery is that of a dictatorial, bubblegum-popping, queen bee cheerleader determined to win at any cost. EP closer “Secret (Shh)”’s drop of wubby, hydraulic bass opens up like a quicksand pit in the middle of the song, threatening to suck all its surroundings into its bottomless vortex; accompanying high-pitched screeches merely seem to soundtrack the unfortunate souls being sucked into this well of desire. This is no simple secret; rather, this is all-consuming lust, a desire so destabilizing and disorienting it nearly demands you as sacrifice. When paired with its feverish lyrics—“I’m ready to climb the walls” and “I feel like an animal on all fours”—you can see Charli as the unhinged lover, scaling the walls like a spider.
Vroom Vroom clocks in at a mere 12 minutes, yet those 12 minutes would go on to change the course of pop, heralding the ascendant scene of 2020’s hyperpop. When 2024’s brat rolled around, Charli had already spent years in the fast lane. (And in many ways, the Crash to brat pipeline mirrored the Sucker to Vroom Vroom conversion that’d taken place almost a decade prior.) By the time the mainstream embraced Brat Summer—where Charli was finally able to actualize both experimental pop credo and chart success—it was clear that she was speeding away again, sun roof open and middle finger out the window. But can’t you see? After all, she’s cute, sexy, and her ride’s sporty. And you know that you can’t catch her.
Lydia Wei is a writer based in DC. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Pitchfork, Washingtonian, Washington City Paper, and elsewhere. Find her online at lydia-wei.com.
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