Charli was born Charlotte Aitchison, in 1992, to a Scottish father and Indian mother. Back in the ’70s, her dad had been a party promoter with a disco club in Bishop’s Stortford, the town where Charli grew up an hour north of London. Her parents actually met at his club, she says, at a New Year’s Eve party while he, dressed like John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever, was changing a keg at midnight. For Charli, though, home was a quiet place. Her attempts to lead friends in playground versions of Spice Girls songs were a bust, and the only band at her school played Guns N’ Roses covers. She dated their young lead singer for a while, but as a teen she began to focus her musical interests far elsewhere: on a trashy, neon party-world she was discovering online through artists like Uffie and the French label Ed Banger.

At 14, Charli started making beats on a Yamaha keyboard and posted her first songs to Myspace. “I was rapping about dinosaurs and teddy bears and that whole world of, like, cuteness, you know?” she says now. “Some of it was fucking terrible.” Some of it was pretty compelling, too, like her song “Art Bitch,” with tricky lyrics that consist entirely of backhanded compliments to a popular artsy teen; the song is an eternal puzzle, because as a listener you can never quite tell if Charli is meant to seem justified in her condescension or pathetically jealous. In any case, before long her music caught the attention of a local party guy named Chaz Cool, of the band The Coolness, who invited her to play some raves of her own. “My first one and the best one I ever did was when I was 15,” she says, “in a peanut factory in Hackney. I went with my parents and we stayed until 6 a.m. My dad was real into it. There was loads of people dressed up as zebras. It was like a real drug scene, party scene, and I’d only seen that on Skins. I played at two in the morning, then three weeks later I turned 16 and signed a deal.”

One of the reasons Charli says she decided to go with Asylum Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic, was because she got along so well with the man who signed her, Ed Howard, and his wife, Miranda Cooper, who was part of the songwriting team behind tracks for Girls Aloud and Sugababes. Though those titan British girl groups of the 2000s were very much a product of the pop music machine, Charli was initially uncomfortable with being a part of that world. “When you’re 16 and you sign and you go through rounds with producers, that kind of factory way where you go in and you meet someone and you do a song and you leave — you don’t really know who you are,” she says. “Even though I think I wrote some really fucking good songs in that time, it sounded like everybody else. I didn’t know what I sounded like yet.” It took a few years of detours — including an abandoned stint at the Slade School of Fine Art, which hit either its high or low point when Charli did a performance art piece where she danced with a bunch of hamburgers stuffed in her bikini — before she recorded her first album.

In 2012, Charli started working with the producer Ariel Rechsthaid, feeling much appreciation for the comfortingly anti-factory studio he had in his backyard in L.A. Together they developed the busy sound of True Romance, which gestured equally to left-field EDM and ’80s gothic rock, and frequently buried her vocals in tricky effects. “I definitely felt like I was afraid when I wrote that record, and you can hear it,” Charli told Pitchfork a year after it was released. “I wanted to make a pop record, but I wanted to make it ‘cool.’” While True Romance was self-conscious to a fault, its sound was very of-the-time. Reviews compared Charli favorably to Grimes, and remixes connected her to a well-curated group of popular-yet-indie artists, including Blood Orange, Odd Future, and Jai Paul.

The album wasn’t a blockbuster — in its first year, it sold just 12,000 copies in the U.S., according to Soundscan — but by then Charli had already proven her ability to write a hit. “I Love It,” a sneery track she’d off-handedly penned in a hotel room around the same time, far out-performed anything on her album when her demo was re-recorded by the group Icona Pop. There were memorable lyrics, like the generation-rallying You’re from the ’70s, but I’m a ’90s bitch, and it was the first song to feature what’s become a Charli XCX signature: a subtly catchy melody paired with the sort of easy hook that anyone can scream-sing along. I don’t care! I love it! But Charli initially distanced herself from the track, telling people that she’d given it away because it didn’t fit the vibe of her debut, or that the words didn’t mean anything, or that it just didn’t feel like her.

Which made it all the more frustrating when, more than her album, it was the thing that people in the music business wanted her to recreate. “That song set me up in this factory of songwriting, which, at the time, I hated,” she says, “but now I love. Going into the studio and being asked to write over and over again for other artists, and kind of recapture that energy — that’s definitely how I enjoy working now, and what I enjoy about making music: that I can just go and do it really quickly. Now I just want to write songs like that all the time. I just want to work, like, top line, top line, top line, top line,” she says, referring to a song’s punchiest combo of melody and lyrics.