ᴡʀᴀᴘᴘᴇᴅ // unpacked 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟒
16. Girl Like Me
Slayyyter
This is an irresistible pop confection from Slayyyter’s Starfucker, and the closest the album comes to the candy-coated bubblegum sound of her droplet and mixtape eras. “Girl Like Me” is a bubbly dance track that finds the narrator indulging in the complex array of emotions that come with a new relationship — excitement, longing, doubt and perhaps most interestingly insecurity — as well as “martinis at the bar” and “dripping soft cherry ice cream” — decadent details that add to the song’s sweetness. This track represents a turn for Starfucker’s femme fatale — no longer seeing men as pawns in her fame game, she now longs for an authentic connection, but worries her reputation will put their relationship in jeopardy. “Can’t deny this kind of chemistry, you know / Hoping and wishing we are meant to be / Are you looking for a girl like me tonight?” The ending of this love story is never revealed. But this song is so exuberant, it makes you feel like sitting in amorous uncertainty can be an exhilarating experience on its own.
17. Everything is romantic
Charli xcx
For all of Brat’s unexpected turns “Everything is romantic” is perhaps the album’s most daring. The title alone is a bold assertion, due to both the all-encompassing breadth of “everything” and the tragic complexity of romance. The word “romantic” brings to mind love, the Tiktok trend of romanticizing daily life, and romanticism as an artistic and intellectual movement. On a close read, the song expresses elements of each.
The song announces itself with an introduction that’s as audacious as its title — dramatic strings that build throughout the first verse, a stark contrast to the previous track’s grinding electronic beat. Before long, the instrumental switches to a clanky electronic breakdown more aligned with the rest of the album’s club sound and Charli repeats the verse. The lyrics offer their own vibrant contrasts — “Bad tattoos on leather tan skin / Jesus christ on a plastic sign” … “Lemons on the trees and on the ground / Sandals in the stirrups of the scooters / Neon orange drinks on the beach.” During distinct “early nights in white sheets with lace curtains,” through her windows, Charli observes both Capri and “Pompeii in the distance” — Capri being an ideal island destination, and Pompeii being the site of one of the deadliest volcanic eruptions in history.
With each line, Charli paints an idyllic portrait that’s challenged by the implicit binaries drawn from her descriptions — natural/artificial, spiritual/material, beautiful/grotesque and decadence/destruction. Still, Charli insists, “Everything is romantic.” The song continues with more unexpected sonic turns — water bubbling; waves crashing; drums that rapidly whip and pound; and countless bleeps and boops that burst between the romantic strings from the start of the song — emphasizing her exploration of binaries with sounds that blur the lines between organic and electronic.
It’s all very romantic — in every sense of the word. From one perspective, the song offers sentimental descriptions of a summer romance in Italy. A closer look reveals the seedy side of her ideal depiction — sun-damaged skin, processed food, natural disaster, heartbreak — but Charli romanticizes even these. That itself is an act of romanticism in the cultural sense, which Britannica describes as “a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality” that “emphasized … the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.”
In embracing the euphoric highs of new love, leisure and luxury, as well as the stark realities of disaster, destruction and death, Charli makes her own transcendental statement about the human experience. Nothing lasts forever. Love will always lead to heartbreak somewhere down the line. We all die someday. Still, we “fall in love again and again” — not in spite of the ephemerality of life, but because of it. When you romanticize your life to the extent Charli does on this track, even the painful parts just add richness — and, yes, romance — to the experience.
18. Chanel No. 5 ⚠
Camila Cabello
What makes unfaithful men stray from their primary partners? According to Camila Cabello, all it takes is a few sprays of luxury perfume. Cheater or no, man is simple. But the subtext of this track — from Camila’s polarizing fourth studio album C,XOXO — and the scandalous history of the titular scent paint a more complex and captivating portrait of The Other Woman. “Chanel No. 5” comes from the perspective of a self-described “cute girl with a sick mind” who seems to be entangled in an affair:
…it’s a crime
I know what he likes — a cat eye, a black dress…
…
If I want him, he’s all mine
I know just how to fuck with his mind
Wrist, wrist, spritz, spritz, make him come alive (ah!)*
Chanel No. 5
*The “ah!” is necessary. It’s the best part.
But this is not Nina Simone’s other woman, who “has time to manicure her nails” and “is perfect where her rival fails.” In the verses, Camila is frank about her imperfections — she’s “a real problem”; a heartbreaker with a violent streak and chipped red nail polish. Still, she knows she has an allure her lover’s primary partner lacks — “she’s an extra, I’m your leading lady.”
It’s not an accident that Camila chose Chanel No. 5 as her femme fatale’s love potion of choice. Its creator, Coco Chanel, had her own series of lurid affairs while building her luxury empire from humble beginnings. Her No. 5 was a pariah in its own right, challenging traditional ideas about fragrance and gender norms. Inspired by her distaste for both the scents worn by the other high-class mistresses and sex workers she found herself surrounded by — a pungent hodge podge of mixed florals and heavy musk — as well as the society ladies’ uninspired scents — perfumes modeled after singular blooms — Coco sought to create something that represented a new feminine ideal.
She combined the traditional florals of society ladies and the heavy musk of the other women with cutting-edge synthetic ingredients to create an alluring and innovative scent that remains one of the top-selling fragrances in the world. Chanel No. 5 (the perfume) has developed a cult following and become an icon of aspiration — as Sara Idacavage writes, people will buy the fragrance “to get a ‘whiff’ of the wealth and exclusivity that the Chanel brand continues to represent.”
The perfume seems to play a similar role for the narrator of “Chanel No. 5” (the song). She wears it to excite her lover, yes, but it’s also a source of worth and power. Camila described C,XOXO as a “sensual” album, but “in the root meaning sense of that word … meaning ‘of the senses.’” “Chanel No. 5” is both sensual and of the senses, and for Camila, the two ideas are connected. “i want us to feel powerful when we are seen, heard, touched, inhaled, and tasted,” she said to People.com. On “Chanel No. 5, the narrator uses scent and sensuality to find empowerment in her imperfections, the way Coco did to build her empire. In doing so, she creates her own feminine ideal that’s as complex as the “abstract” fragrance she wears.
19. ice
Erika de Casier feat. They Hate Change
Erika de Casier delivered another solid set of moody electronic R&B tracks that capture the woes of modern dating with her 2024 effort. Her third studio album Still is another front-to-back masterpiece, but “ice,” the album’s second single, is a standout. The song recalls the ups and downs of an on-again/off-again situationship over a groovy, bass-heavy backtrack. The ice metaphor is used cleverly throughout the song — the partners are often cold to each other, but hold onto “hopes of one day getting warm”; the unstable relationship is (of course) “hot and cold” — but like most of her songs, what makes this song special is the brutal honesty and vulnerability of the more straightforward lyrics. My favorite comes from the chorus, where Erika confesses she finds herself “falling harder every time you ghost me.” Oof. Relatable. Like Charli’s “B2b,” this song captures all the conflicting emotions that come up in these sort of fraught relationships, and the struggle to move on — but unlike Charli, she does break the cycle. After several looped choruses, the track ends at Erika’s command — “Stop.”
20. 365 ⚠
Charli xcx
The final track from the standard edition of Brat is half party anthem, half punchline. “365” is arguably the album’s edgiest song, centered largely on the narrator’s penchant for coked-out club nights. It follows one of the album’s most sentimental moments — Charli’s vulnerable reflection on the possibility of motherhood, “I think about it all the time.” On any other album, that would feel disorienting, but in the context of this album, it feels less like mood whiplash and more like comic relief. It incorporates the Brat persona in more ways than one — it’s a bratty move to order the tracks that way and such harsh emotional transitions aren’t uncommon in the club scene, where trauma dumping at the bar can turn into a joyful rush to the dance floor the moment you hear “Bumpin’ that, bumpin’ that..”
The title also adds a cute twist — 365 is the number of days in a year, and 360 is the number of degrees in a complete rotation. Like the earth completes its journey around the sun back where it began, “365” gives listeners an invitation to return to “360” and revisit the entirety of Brat once again. It feels relevant since the concept of time and the repetition of cycles is a theme throughout the album. While this track is fun enough as a dumb party song, Charli’s commitment to her craft shines through with those sorts of details. It makes sense that Charli takes even silly songs so seriously — marrying high and low culture was outlined as a key element of Brat in the project’s manifesto. As the last track of the album, which dominated culture for almost a year, “365” was truly the beginning.