Charli XCX opens up about mixed-race identity impacted her album ‘Brat’

Charli XCX said her mixed race identity played a major role in shaping her record-breaking album Brat.

In a candid conversation with Swedish rapper Yung Lean for Dazed magazine’s Winter 2025 issue, the 33-year-old singer reflects on the challenges she has faced as a mixed race woman in music.

The Speed Drive songstress raised in England by her Scottish father and Indian mother, Charli admitted that feeling like an outsider is nothing new to her.

She explained, “I never felt accepted where I went, whether that was in school for being half-Indian and not blonde, or not fully relating to my Indian self because I was half-white, there was this weird, displaced feeling, where I couldn’t quite fit into either place.”

Those feelings continued into her career as she said, “Then with music, being outside of the mainstream and wanting to be in that world, but also really wanting to reject it. It created this concoction that allowed me to [make Brat], I feel like I used to be very afraid. Not since 2016, really, but prior to that I was very afraid." 

Charli has often spoken about the complexities of growing up between cultures. In her Vogue Singapore 2024 cover story, she said she “grew up in two half-lives.”

The Official singer recalled, “When I would go and visit my mum’s family, I felt very Indian, but then I’d go home to this other world, which was largely white… I never quite felt like I fit into either world, which I think commonly happens with mixed-race kids.”

For the unversed, Charli XCX’s album Brat was released on June 7, 2024.