Charli XCX opened up about what it has really been like to move through the world as a mixed-race woman and how those feelings shaped her music, especially her hit album Brat. In a conversation with Swedish rapper Yung Lean for Dazed magazine’s Winter 2025 Issue, the 33-year-old singer didn’t hold back. With a Scottish father and an Indian mother, she said she spent most of her life feeling like she existed in the in between.
She admitted that growing up in England came with a constant sense of not belonging. “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,” she said, reported PEOPLE. “There was this weird, displaced feeling, where I couldn’t quite fit into either place.” That tension ended up shaping her early life more than she realized at the time.
The 365 singer, born Charlotte Aitchison, said she carried that same sense of being an outsider into her music career. “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],” she said. Charli explained that she never fully felt comfortable playing by the rules of pop, but also didn’t want to be pushed to the edges of it. That push and pull ended up being part of what made Brat stand out.
She also shared that fear used to play a much bigger role in her life than it does now. “I feel like I used to be very afraid. Not since 2016, really, but prior to that I was very afraid,” she said. The shift seemed to happen once she started trusting her instincts and permitting herself to create music that wasn’t chasing approval from any one world.
Charli has always spoken warmly about her parents, Jon and Shameera Aitchison, calling them her biggest supporters. Still, she hasn’t shied away from discussing the identity challenges that came with having parents of different races. The mix of cultures gave her a sense of richness but also added to the difficulty of figuring out where she fit.
She reflected on that experience in Vogue Singapore in 2024. “When I would go and visit my mum’s family, I felt very Indian. It was all the classic scenes of my nani and bappa cooking with Bollywood films playing in the background and everybody speaking in Gujarati,” she said. Those moments grounded her in her heritage and made her feel connected to that part of herself.
“But then I’d go home to this other world, which was largely white. It was almost like I would experience the Indian part of my identity only on the weekends. I never quite felt like I fit into either world, which I think commonly happens with mixed-race kids,” she added at the time.
Her willingness to share these experiences now makes it easier to see how Brat became what it is. The tension, the searching, the feeling of never quite being claimed by any one place or group, all of it ended up fueling one of her most defining creative moments.