CREATURE from the BRAT LAGOON

Charli XCX owned the summer with an album that is also a vibe. Should she be sweating the fall?

- BROCK COLYAR

IM ALWAYS LIKE, More, more, more, more, more, more. Doing it overload," says Charli XCX.

"But this week has been ... a lot." It's a Wednesday morning in late July, less than 72 hours after she offhandedly tweeted "kamala IS brat," accidentally redefining an entire presidential campaign, and Charli has invited me to a Le Labo-scented spa in West Hollywood to decompress. Her assistant booked us a private room for an hour under "Charlotte," the 32-year-old British artist's real name, which pretty much no one remembers anymore. She's dealing with a performance-related neck injury-"It flares up a lot when I'm stressed"-and things have been a bit stressful lately. Charli arrived in her black Porsche 911, wearing knee-high leather boots and big bitchy Khaite sunglasses; she was giving Balenciaga walk of shame, though she insists she didn't go out last night.

"This is a little... intimate, yeah?" she says before stripping down to an itty-bitty cheetah-print bikini and stepping into a sauna so awkwardly small I kind of can't believe it's designed for two people, let alone two strangers. She's barefaced, already sweating, her usual mountain of curly black hair extensions gone. It's 158 degrees.

"You're going to get me in a really vulnerable position. You can ask me something crazy," she says. It's a teasingly seductive invitation, but Charli is not about to expose herself any further.

Although she still refers to herself as an "underdog pop girl," her album Brat has gone so mainstream this summer that this veteran club rat seems anxious about how to both keep it going and stop it from crossing over into cringe in the process. "Sometimes you're the people's princess," she tells me. "And sometimes you're the villain." Ubiquity will run you hard.