If Number 1 Angel is a mixtape, why do you have to pay for it? The hit-generating songwriter-for-hire is taking a strange, tortuous route to stardom

It’s boring to listen to rich and successful pop stars moaning about how fame has changed them. But it’s equally tedious to listen to them moan about their major label backers. Like listening to a one-sided rant about your mate’s boss, but magnified by a million, it only really serves as a short-term anger management solution for the artist, while the public airing of dirty laundry doesn’t often hurry the label along. Having said that, in the case of bona fide pop star and hit-generating songwriter-for-hire Charli XCX – who recently released a new mixtape in place of her delayed third album – her gripes highlight some interesting problems with being a major label pop star in 2017. While some pop stars seem to float effortlessly through every part of their career, Charli XCX’s trajectory so far feels like wading through treacle.

Charli XCX: From east London warehouse parties to US No 1 Read more

When Charli XCX – Charlotte Aitchison – arrived with 2013’s excellent True Romance, she was a blog-friendly, goth-pop practitioner whose critical plaudits outweighed her commercial success so heavily she seemed to exist only in print. It’s safe to assume first-week UK sales of 1,241 copies for True Romance wouldn’t have initially excited her label Atlantic, with the success of a pop star’s debut hugely important when it comes to things such as contract renewals. But, like Sia, Charli had an extra, more lucrative string to her bow: she can knock out radio-slaying hits for others, seemingly in the blink of an eye.

In 2013 she co-wrote and featured on Icona Pop’s I Love It, a UK chart-topper and US Top 10 hit, which was swiftly followed by the equally massive Fancy by Iggy Azalea. Since then she’s written Selena Gomez’s US Top 5 hit Same Old Love (initially recorded by Rihanna), and worked with everyone from James Blunt to will.i.am to Blondie.



The Icona Pop hit meant Atlantic continued to back her, but creatively she was hobbled by the label wanting her to reproduce that song’s formula, a creative cul-de-sac repeated by the success of Fancy. While the songwriter-for-hire guise gave her a new press angle, it also slowly started to overshadow her own work, a delicate push/pull that she’s never quite overcome. As an act of rebellion she recorded an album of bratty, punk-inspired songs in two days that has yet to see the light of day.

With her name becoming more well-known in the mainstream thanks to her featured appearances, Aitchison started work on proper follow-up Sucker, a muddled album she’s since said she hates that tried to fuse her pent-up creative frustrations with trend-chasing chart fodder (Break the Rules), and songs originally rejected by other artists (Die Tonight was politely declined by One Direction).

Charli XCX: Sucker review – hype and glory Read more

What Sucker had that True Romance didn’t, however, was a genuine hit, and not one she’d written for someone else. A UK and US Top 10 in July 2014, Boom Clap created a momentum the album should have built on, but instead Sucker didn’t arrive in the UK until February 2015, two months after its release in America. Bored with the songs she’d started working on years before, there was a certain inevitability when Aitchison ended up cancelling the Sucker US tour so she could start work on new music.



Creatively restless and stylistically versatile, at a time when major label pop stars seem tied to a homogenous, Spotify playlist-friendly sound, Charli XCX sometimes seems to be a new artist with each new release, which creates its own problems. Sucker, which added a second UK Top 10 hit with Doing It, was swiftly followed by the more polarising Vroom Vroom EP, a collaboration with maverick UK pop producer Sophie, which sounded like drunk cheerleaders chanting over the squeak of pink PVC catsuits rubbing together.

While other pop stars called on the PC Music collective, to which Sophie is connected, for blog-friendly remixes, Aitchison dived headfirst into their synthetic pop sound, combining Sophie’s experimental outlook with the steadying hands of Norwegian super-producers Stargate for her third album. Lead single After the Afterparty – a rubbery ode to Aitchison’s new LA-based champagne lifestyle – was released last November, entering the charts at No 73. Two months later, thanks to radio support and steady streaming numbers, it peaked at No 29, the perfect launchpad for album three, right? Well, no, not really.



Conversely, the song’s slow-burn success (it spent four months in the Top 75 – which in the current streaming climate is fairly standard) seemed to catch Atlantic off guard. Charli eventually announced the album, which she’d started in 2015, would now (possibly) be out in September this year rather than May.

Having finally turned the much heralded PC Music sound into a semi-hit, it now seemed as if that all important momentum had gone again. In the flexible world of modern pop, complete with buzz tracks, “impact dates” and chucking out music until something sticks, there seemed to be a complete disconnect between label and artist. “I work very quickly, so I’m ready to put things out,” Charli told The Kidd Kraddick radio show last month, announcing she’d be releasing a free mixtape in the meantime.

She later told Dallas radio station Hot 93.3 that the mixtape was created behind Atlantic’s back, while she was feeling “very frustrated and annoyed”. Frustration reared its head again when she was asked by NME about the album’s delay: “Of course it gets frustrating. But you know, that’s just the game now, I guess. Whatever … While the label stress about all of that shit, I can just be in the studio, which I like.”



A modern emblem of creative freedom, the Charli XCX mixtape was described as such “so it can go out for free, but it’s essentially an album”. In a world governed by the power of streaming sites – if you don’t play by the rules, you don’t get on those all-important public playlists, which affects your chart position – the supposedly off-the-cuff, hastily recorded mixtape quickly morphed into a completely different entity once the label got wind of it.

“You have no idea how fucking hard it is to just release a free fucking mixtape in 2017,” Aitchison tweeted a few weeks ago. She continued: “Everyone’s like, what about Spotify/Apple/upsetting other majors if it’s free/what if people think it’s ur album/what if it doesn’t ‘do well’.” In the end the actually very good mixtape/album, Number 1 Angel, which features Mø, Raye and Uffie, was released on 10 March, with three songs premiered on Radio 1 ahead of release to keep them happy. It’s also available to stream on all platforms and, depressingly, available to buy for £4.99 on iTunes, raising the questions: When is a mixtape really an album and vice versa? And, if you have to pay for it, how can it be a mixtape?



Oddly, by forcing her into a position of releasing what she’d declared to be a mixtape through the same channels as an actual album, the label has only reinforced the confusion. The covert nature of its creation also smacks of a lack of trust between the two sides, while the sense of history repeating itself is a sign of no one really learning lessons.

In theory, this workplace frustration is good news for fans, who now have a 10-track album of forward-thinking pop to tide them over until the album proper. In Charli XCX’s case, however, it could just be the latest in what has felt like a long campaign of battles.

