Charli XCX – ‘Sucker’

This year’s first great pop record bowls in with a rapturous celebration of the genre’s rebellious, trashy potential (and a bottle of champagne and a pocketful of pills to boot). From the “fuck you”-heavy title track onwards, 22-year-old Charli XCX’s main mode is rejection – flipping off authority on ‘Break The Rules’, flicking off oneself in the face of a shit lover on the electrifying ‘Body Of My Own’ – which she executes with total aplomb. But ‘Sucker’ finds depth when Charli drops her guard. There’s ‘Need Ur Luv’, a shoo-wop collaboration with Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, then, after fantasising about living inside a castle made of money on ‘Gold Coins’, the awed devotional ‘Boom Clap’, where she confesses to her crush, “No silver or no gold could dress me up so good”.