Pop 2 turned out to look, sound, feel, engage people, and elevate a career like an album might. But Charli xcx didn’t want to get bogged down in the attention and expectations of the album cycle and campaign when she was trying to exercise total creative freedom. Plus, she was also figuring out the small matter of what the future of pop music might sound like: bubbly, hyperreal, electronic, and, at times, emotionally reflective. And so, this masterfully crafted full-length record is modestly titled a “mixtape.” Either way, Pop 2—executive produced by Charli’s long-term collaborator A. G. Cook—combined the avant-garde experimentalism of her earlier EP Vroom Vroom with her pop hit-writing ability (the woman who wrote Icona Pop’s “I Love It” knows how to create an era-defining track). Charli uses the tropes of nostalgic ’90s and early 2000s pop music to her advantage, playing with the listener’s knowledge of them. On soaring opener “Backseat,” for instance, she has Carly Rae Jepsen echo her in dreamily singing “all alone” again and again (and again). At one point on vogue club track “Unlock It,” she endlessly repeats the phrase “lock it” in her addictive posh schoolgirl-sounding voice. Auto-Tune across it all is turned up to 11. One song is even dedicated to a Porsche. There’s something, well, bratty about it all, laying the foundations of her future pop culture phenomenon, 2024’s year-defining BRAT. Her visionary eye extends to seeing the talent in worthy allies. Every track is a play-by-play of pop disruptors, from Caroline Polachek (“Tears”) to Kim Petras (“Unlock It”) and Tommy Cash (“Delicious”). With Pop 2, though, it’s Charli who’s in the driver’s seat, showing the world what pop music in the 2010s and 2020s could be.