Vroom Vroom Turns 10

"I released some of my favorite music in 2016," Charli XCX recalled in a recent podcast interview when asked to weigh in on the viral 2016 nostalgia trend that permeated social media early this year. "I released a song and an EP called the Vroom Vroom EP." Not a lot of artists make some of their best work at 23; even fewer veteran artists make their favorite work at that age. But thank goodness Charli loved Vroom Vroom, perhaps still her most polarizing entry in a catalog full of left turns. Somebody had to love Vroom Vroom.

A couple of years before Vroom Vroom was released a decade ago today, Charli XCX — the daughter of a onetime club promoter in London — had already ascended the ranks from teenaged rave rat to radio hitmaker. Growing up, she remembers being the lone Spice Girls superfan in a sea of classic rock-admiring classmates, and her 2014 sophomore album Sucker was a fitting amalgamation of her primary influences up to that point: buzzing EDM synths, some Britpop-style guitars, and a Myspace party-girl snark. Sucker birthed hits like “Break The Rules” and “Boom Clap,” songs that Charli has notably tried to distance herself from. Since Sucker’s release, she hasn’t shown a ton of interest in reflecting on the actual music comprising it — “I’ve been over it since we released it,” she told i-D in 2015 — but she knows some good came out of it. It was a crucial stop on the road to Vroom Vroom.

In that same i-D interview, Charli dropped a few glaring hints regarding Vroom Vroom. She’d been listening to a lot of PC Music, A. G. Cook’s proto-hyperpop music collective, and had been collaborating with one of its mainstays Sophie. Sophie, the late UK producer who was then still very much a purveyor of the underground, had garnered a cult following with songs like "Lemonade" and “Hey QT,” the latter a one-off performance art/recording project with Cook and fellow PC affiliate Hayden Dunham. 

Charli reached out to Sophie via cold call, and the two kicked off a few songwriting sessions in the first half of 2015, not long before Charli was slated to go on a co-headlining American tour with Jack Antonoff’s Bleachers. The writing bug, evidently, got her good: Halfway through the tour Charli abruptly cancelled the rest of her appearances, expressing a desire to get back into the studio as soon as possible. “I am struggling to create whilst I’m on the road and that is making me unhappy,” she wrote on Facebook. “As an artist I need to move quickly and write a lot to not feel restless. Sometimes touring really puts me in this isolated world where I feel down and sad but primarily I struggle to multitask and write songs at the same time which is what I need to do to feel OK.” The decision paid off, and Vroom Vroom’s title track arrived as a one-off single that October. 

Charli has at numerous points in her career promised that her next move would be a surprising one, but that’s probably never been truer than it was in the case of “Vroom Vroom.” Though its on-the-nose exclamations of “let’s ride” and “beep beep” are unabashedly cheeky — particularly so in the case of Charli, whose discography since has offered plenty of petrolhead fodder — the subtly self-referential “Vroom Vroom” was, in a way, the most authentic song Charli had released yet. “I think my label got afraid, and I think a lot of people were confused,” she told The Fader at the time. “But… I just wanted to do that. That’s the scene I came from when I was younger, that club scene. That’s originally what I saw in Sophie, and I’d never actually made music that was representative of that.”

And a lot of people were confused by the Vroom Vroom rollout, indeed. Charli, whose collaborators up until Vroom Vroom still primarily skewed towards mainstream pop and big-name Swedish producers , entertained but befuddled audiences when she performed “Boom Clap” and “Hey QT” in the same 2016 SXSW set with Sophie onstage beside her. Reviews for the EP were incredibly mixed: Some affectionately likened it to the “bubble-thrash” noise of Sleigh Bells’ beloved debut Treats, while others mistook its brashiness for soullessness. (When I started writing reviews for Pitchfork in 2019, a friend outside the industry half-jokingly asked me if there was any chance the publication would recant their 4.5/10 score of the EP. A few years later, after author and eternal good sport Laura Snapes “publicly disavowed the nonsense [she] wrote about Vroom Vroom,” they did just that.)

Charli was one of many pop stars making clever, thoughtful music in the mid-2010s, but the brilliance of Vroom Vroom was in its fine print. You won’t find much in the way of truly moving lyrics, but Charli’s knack as a self-professed curator comes through in the EP’s sound: The Hannah Diamond-featuring “Paradise” is arguably the decade’s most thrilling take on old-school Eurodance, the Pulp Fiction-sampling “Trophy” is an ultra-glossy, futuristic nod to dancehall beats, and the moody instrumental of “Secret (Shh)” is just a hop, skip, and jump away from the UK grime of Charli’s youth. With Sophie at the production helm — keeping each track bold and impactful without ever spinning too far off the course — Vroom Vroom is a brief, but powerful test of pop music’s boundaries. 

Even skeptics of Vroom Vroom intuited that it would be impactful, seemingly concerned at what an EP full of purported vapidness, abrasive percussion, and vocals distorted into oblivion could mean for popular music at large. Perhaps critically, however, Vroom Vroom introduced the masses to Sophie and helped launch the subgenre we now know as hyperpop, which artists like 100 gecs and Jane Remover have since shaped into an ultra-online movement powered by maximalism and hedonism. Charli, meanwhile, would keep the party going at the clubs with 2017’s one-two punch Number 1 Angel and Pop 2. 2020’s how i’m feeling now used the noise as a backdrop for COVID-isolated introspection, while Charli’s 2024 opus Brat would find the harmony between the two sides. None of those albums, now pretty unanimously considered among the best in Charli’s discography, would exist without the perplexing and messy road paved by Vroom Vroom. Our driver even warned us: If you couldn’t get on board, you were just too slow.