Charli XCX hasn’t quite enjoyed the mainstream crossover she’s obviously capable of, but her influence looms over pop as a songwriter and a test site for daring ideas. The Vroom Vroom EP is her latest experiment: Produced entirely by PC Music's Sophie, it finds Charli in her trademark middle-finger-flipped repose. But here, the 23-year-old Brit veers away from the marketable rebellion that underpins her poppier work: Vroom Vroom is pointedly uncommercial and abrasive. The title track sounds like a rickety clown car whose horn toots Missy's "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)"—a blocky, disjointed paean to fast rides and good times. "Boom boom boom/ Hear me coming through the radio," she speak-sings with affected enunciation, referencing her hit song from The Fault in Our Stars soundtrack. "Watch me go zoom zoom zoom/ Try to catch me but you're too slow."

The lyrics to Vroom Vroom deal with being young, free, hedonistic, and ambitious in ferociously trite terms, and to a tinny soundtrack. "Cute, sexy, and my ride's sporty," Charli sing-songs on "Vroom Vroom." "Dance while we're young on top of the mountain," she trills on "Paradise," a Eurotrance duet with Hannah Diamond, one of PC Music's leading faces. Is she sending up pop’s shallow triumphalism? Or reinforcing it? As Charli sees it, audiences are smart enough to detect the artistic intent at the heart of this collaboration—to "be sharp, potent [and] deadly," as she said in a statement, and be "number one," as "Trophy" puts it. But few things are as wearying as pop culture that constantly congratulates you on how clever you are for "getting it," and Vroom Vroom is nothing if not exhausting. Spring Breakers is a good litmus test here: If you were a fan of Harmony Korine's 2012 exploitation flick, you'll probably love the intentional shallowness and plasticky transgression of Vroom Vroom. If (like me) you would have walked out had you not spent $18 on a ticket, you'll probably hate it.

Charli and Sophie do push each other here, though only one of them really benefits: Paired with an actual songwriter, Vroom Vroom is the closest Sophie's ever come to making viable pop songs. "Paradise" at least feels complete, a trance ballad indebted to East 17 and Avril Lavigne that continually peaks without offering much of a payoff, other than a horrible processed baby-voice refrain, and some brief, lovely harmonies between Charli and Hannah Diamond. Hooked around a sample from Pulp Fiction, "Trophy" pits Charli’s confrontational rap ("bitch I’m here to fuck you up") against a glitchy dancehall beat reminiscent of Major Lazer. It’s relentless and dispiriting, too shallow to pass as sincere, too obvious to work as satire—if that is the intention, then it comes off closer to a cheap "Weird Al" Yankovich pop rip than, say, the KLF or ZTT Records’ early output.

At times, Vroom Vroom recalls Britney Spears' Blackout, made in the wake of Spears’ public breakdown. Spears was always assumed to have little agency in her own work, and on that record she toyed brilliantly with ideas of autonomy and unwholesomeness, using sharp lyrics and sharper production to play with the idea of disintegrating identity. These same ideas underpin the PC Music project, and you can hear them at work on Vroom VroomEP. But no one is being done any favors reducing Charli XCX to a vapid cypher, particularly as it drains her vivid personality from the work. The EP bottoms out on the final track "Secret (Shh),” a grime-indebted ooze where she does a generic good-girl-gone-bad routine that yanks all the joy out of misbehaving. Sucker was thrilling because it felt like pop with a death wish, its creator giving her all in the name of sheer recklessness and pure kicks. Vroom Vroom just sounds dead behind the eyes.