When Charli XCX dropped her sixth studio album, Brat, on June 7, the internet was immediately set ablaze. While plenty of songs prompted discourse—“360,” with its flock of It girls; “I think about it all the time,” with its reflections on the weirdness of having friends with kids—“Girl, so confusing” started a different sort of conversation, thanks to Charli’s allusions to a famous frenemy with “the same hair” as hers. It took all of five seconds for sleuths to deduce that the subject of the song was Lorde—though that conclusion was somewhat complicated by the fact that Lorde had quickly taken to Instagram to sing Brat’s praises.
More bewildering still, Lorde actually responded to the song. Last night, the two artists dropped their first-ever collaboration, “The girl, so confusing version with lorde” remix, produced by A.G. Cook. Instead of a cheeky, throwaway verse, Lorde met Charli’s stated insecurities about their relationship (“We talk about making music / But I don’t know if it’s honest / Can’t tell if you wanna see me / Falling over and failing”) with searing honesty of her own. “You’d always say, ‘Let’s go out’ / But then I’d cancel last minute / I was so lost in my head / And scared to be in your pictures,” Lorde sings. “’Cause for the last couple years / I’ve been at war with my body / I tried to starve myself thinner / And then I gained all the weight back / I was trapped in the hatred / And your life seemed so awesome / I never thought for a second / My voice was in your head.”
