Everything is romantic

"Everything is romantic," Charli xcx and Caroline Polachek pairing on the brat remix album, is a collision of two of pop's most fearless auteurs. Over A. G. Cook's production — a swirl of strings, warped textures, and a beat that ebbs and surges like Mediterranean tide — the track builds from Charli's diaristic travelogue into something ecstatic and overwhelming. The original's list-like verses catalogue sensory fragments of a European summer; Polachek's arrival detonates the ceiling, her acrobatic, operatic soprano spiraling into wordless heights that turn observation into rapture. The emotional landscape is sensory overload as spiritual experience — the way travel, beauty, and desire can flood you until everything, the grotesque and the gorgeous alike, reads as romantic. Lyrically it's impressionistic, catching mosquitoes, motorbikes, Italian light, love and its debris in the same breathless inventory. Culturally it sits at the apex of 2024's brat phenomenon, art-pop's brainiest wing meeting club maximalism, two singers who treat the voice as an experimental instrument. Best played driving a coastal road at golden hour with the windows down, or anywhere you want mundane life to feel cinematic. It's a song about paying such close attention that ordinary existence tips into the sublime — and then Polachek's voice arrives to prove the point, ascending past language into pure feeling.