Charli XCX looks at everything as if she’s already got a plan for it. It’s not a weird stare and it’s not uncomfortable to be around. But it’s undeniable, from the moment you make eye contact with her, that Charli XCX is always coming up with ideas. For herself and for other people, for artists on the same label and artists who aren’t.

“I saw this video of Anne-Marie doing karate the other day and I was like: ‘You need to do a karate video,’” she says, as if vomiting out the idea unwillingly. “‘It can be one shot. You're just walking down the street, taking out all your ex-boyfriends.’ And she was like, ‘What? You don't work for the label.’ And I was like, 'I know. Just think about it. It's really good.'” She recounts the whole thing with the simmering, nasal tone of a nerd in a teen movie, but you can tell she thought it was a shit-hot idea (it was: so good that Anne-Marie had already done it). It’s sort of a surprise we walked out of her dressing room without my first single written.

There are few pop writers who are as quick, bold and frankly prodigious as Charli. She rose to fame, in part, after Icona Pop picked up her demo “I Love It” (which still features her vocals) and cowriting and featuring on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy”. Then came her album Sucker, which contained her mammoth hit “Boom Clap” but otherwise didn’t seem to satisfy her very much (in one interview, she described her decision to include the song “Break The Rules” succinctly: “I fucked myself”). But it’s this side of Charli that tracks with her still supporting Taylor Swift on tour and still writing huge pop hits. “Señorita” with Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes: she helped write it. She’s collaborated with everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Diplo. Even when she’s not credited, her particular blend of semi-apathetic vocals and walls of nightclub sound has trickled throughout all of pop.

But the people who see Charli XCX as another pop star du jour are missing out on what makes her one of the most vital songwriters, producers and performers of the moment. Her albums, always filled with zigs where many would zag, have become progressively more weird, progressively more queer and progressively more beloved by her hardcore fans, the “Angels”. In 2017 she released two mixtapes: Number 1 Angel and then Pop 2, which have become the pop music equivalents of The Rocky Horror Show: renegade, audacious musical wonderlands that people would die for. It is both thrilling and astonishing that a woman who can get Gen-Z jumping in a stadium can also play a gig like her 2018 show at the Village Underground: Sophie DJ’d; club kids came in full regalia; a punter threw up on the photographer.

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Before Ariana was dropping singles and albums at her whim, and before Robyn’s “Honey” became the white whale of elusive electro-pop bangers, Charli XCX’s musical output broke the mould for what a major label artist could do. Her mixtapes came out amidst work on her third album, born out of “frustration” with the torpor of Atlantic. She’s released singles since willy nilly with no regard for album cycles. Where most stars would end a gig on their most famous single, Charli would end them on her never-released-but-furiously-demanded songs like “Girls Night Out”, knowing her fans would know every word. She knows better than anybody what her fanbase talk about and crave: “I'm very into the troll-y-ness and the memes.” She knows what covers everybody wants her to release (her version of Cher’s “Believe”) and she knows that her fans are still desperate for an official recording of her song “Taxi”. She argues the appetite is there “because the fans can't have it”, she says, laughing. “If I put [it] out, they'd be like... great, what else is there to ask for?”

But when the link came through to preview her new album, Charli, it felt like the security on it was particularly tight. While Charli’s approach to releasing music has defined her and her idiosyncratic form of pop artistry, it’s not entirely been of her own volition. Over the years, Charli has had a few of her songs leaked.

“You say a few songs here and there,” she says, laughing incredulously, “it was all my songs ever made.” In 2017, with her sound evolving with AG Cook and Sophie, and a third album both on the cards and unlikely to see the light of day, reams of her material from across her career filled the internet. Fans traded playlists of her unreleased material like they were Pokemon cards.

She gets why the Angels might do it: “They feel they just want the music and that leaking it is helping me. I didn't really talk about it because I didn't want to encourage more of it, but you know, having your work stolen is really sad,” she says. “It made me feel like I didn't own it anymore.” She says this might be part of why her process as an artist has become so speedy – speedier than most artists signed to major labels. I ask if the leaks had a role in making her release songs in such an ad hoc way as well. “Maybe subconsciously,” she says. “I think it really affected me quite a lot.”

A week after we spoke, there’s another leak: fan favourite “Come To My Party”. Her new album was only three days old before the appetite rose again.

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After so many years of leaks, occasional song drops and mixtapes to sate fans, Charli had garnered an astonishing level of hype. She’d teased songs since October 2018, when she released the knowingly kitsch “1999” with Troye Sivan; she also reimagined Pop 2’s “Track 10” (that’s the actual song name) with woman-of-the-moment Lizzo. Then came collaborations with Christine And The Queens and Haim, but also with the Korean-American house music maverick Yaeji and fellow Myspace alumni Sky Ferreira. Then the track list dropped: there were longtime collaborators such as Kim Petras and Cupcakke and new arrivals such as Big Freedia and Clairo. It was, to paraphrase a gay meme, an iconic sonic moment.

This Warholian pool of collaborators has become part of Charli’s power. She seems to have a knack for finding artists who are going to become the future or getting in there with a new wave of superstars such as Lizzo or K-pop juggernaut BTS. “I don’t really like doing random, cold collabs,” she says. “I don’t believe it and I think audiences can tell. Especially my audience.” Some people – such as Troye Sivan – she met at parties. Some, such as Christine And The Queens’ Héloïse Letissier, she texted and hung out with for ages, “not even talking about music, just talking about life... and being human together”.

Although a lot of regulars return from her mixtapes, Charli feels wildly different. Where Pop 2 existed as a kind of whole, Charli shoots off in different directions, in part because of the number of collaborators leaving their mark. There’s the witchy "Lady Marmalade" meets Stravinsky “Shake It”, poppy moments with Lizzo and Troye and then songs with no collaborators – “Oooh, risky”, she jokes – like the very personal “White Mercedes” about her relationship with her boyfriend Huck Kwong. “It felt weird to have a feature on it, unless it was him, but he’s not really in the game.”

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“The game” is often how Charli describes pop, the industry in which she writes hits for Selena Gomez and appears in Taylor Swift’s line-up. “I don't know if I have the personality type to play the pop game all the time,” she explains. “I love underground culture, I love doing all the wrong things. I need that to feel alive.” Charli XCX has managed the seemingly impossible: she could play the Teen Choice Awards or Berghain’s Panorama Bar.

It doesn’t seem like she plans to come down either side of this anytime soon. Is Charli the sign she’s going back to releasing albums or will she keep drip-feeding? “I don't know if there's a dream way of releasing music for me now,” she says, “I just like making a lot and putting a lot out.” Does she lean more towards top 40 or her weirder, PC-music inflected output? “I enjoy being able to do both,” she says. “I know if I sang ‘Señorita’ it would mean nothing to anyone. I can make pop music, but can I be as good as the people who are really good at pop? Probably not. I’d probably self-sabotage. But nobody can do what I do as well as I can do it.”

And so she keeps collaborating with other artists, whether that’s bequeathing songs to other singers or bringing rising talent into her world. The stable of artists on her own albums is undeniably queer and her music is too: it reeks of a certain type of Hackney club night, just like the raves she first started playing when she was a teenager. “The queer community has a sense of fearlessness and are super down with taking risks,” she explains. “The more I started leaning into that side of me, it opened up this thing inside me where I feel less afraid.” The night after her album comes out, the DJ at Camberwell gay bar The Chateau tweets that they might leave the booth for an hour just to play Charli from start to finish. In the end they play just a few of the new songs (and a few classics). “Shake It”, only 36 hours after release, drives the crowd absolutely bananas.

Which is what Charli wants, in the end, for the music she makes. “I think the ideal place to listen to 75 per cent of this album is in a club or a house party or a rave.” It’s not like she’s thinking, when she writes a song, about where it fits into the architecture of a night out, but she also likes the old school nature of being an artist whose music is discovered on the dance floor rather than Spotify. Charli thinks too much about work all the time, she knows that, but she’s finding ways to practice self-care: she loves going to Korean spas and she loves to party. “Because it's the one time when I'm truly not thinking of anything work related, I'm just thinking about... raging.” She thinks that’s what unites her and her fans, that they love to party as much as she does. So here she is, finally making a big studio album that reeks of poppers. “It's always amazing having a really specific song for a really specific moment in our night,” she says. That’s why she takes on the responsibility of soundtracking your 4am. “It would be such a bummer if something really crap was playing.”

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