Game changer

IF YOU ARE EVER IN NEED OF A STARK REMINDER THAT SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT REAL LIFE, I can recommend Zooming with Charli XCX. Moments before I am due to speak to the pop star, she posts on Instagram to trail the release of her new single, Baby. On all fours in a tasselled leather bikini, with dramatic eye makeup and talon-like nails, she is the epitome of the provocative, vampish pop star.

So when she appears live on my computer screen, it is slightly jarring to see Ithe 29-year-old looking utterly ordinary: dark hair scraped back, no makeup, grey baggy jumper and cradling a mug of coffee. Instead of dramatically writhing, she is thoughtfully musing – in the kind of unclipped, middle-class English drawl that makes everything sound deadpan and dry – about her 13-year career, the majority of which has been spent at the coalface of experimental pop.

To be confronted by these two very different Charlis is extremely fitting. Because for her new album, Crash, the musician – otherwise known as Cambridge-born, Essex-raised Charlotte Aitchison – has decided to embrace the artifice and industrial mechanisms of big-money pop like never before. “I’ve been playing the game,” she explains, in her matter-of-fact way.

Despite signing a five-album major label deal at the age of 16, Aitchison has never neatly slotted into the mainstream pop landscape. She initially caught the attention of record executives with a string of bratty indie-electro tracks, which combined unfiltered, uber-British, Kate Nash-style vocals with