Pitchfork Writer Regrets Infamous Negative Charli XCX Review

A Pitchfork writer has admitted she did Charli XCX dirty back in the day.

Laura Snapes, a well-known music critic for Pitchfork and The Guardian, has come out saying that she regrets her negative review of Charli XCX’s seminal 2016 EP Vroom Vroom and now sees it as the classic it is.

In an article for The Guardian where music writers talk about projects that it took them a while to warm up on, Snapes brings up her infamous 4.5/10 review for Vroom Vroom that called the EP “nothing if not exhausting” and said it had “intentional shallowness and plasticky transgression.”

“One handy/mortifying thing about criticism is having your initial reactions preserved in print forever,” Snapes writes. “When I had Twitter, I never got as much blowback for anything as my Pitchfork review of Charli XCX’s Vroom Vroom EP, which I slated on release in February 2016.”

“At the time, I dismissed it as ‘pointedly uncommercial and abrasive’ and ‘ferociously trite,’” she continues. “It took until seeing her live in 2019 to appreciate those qualities: you’d call it a slow burn if the EP’s car-obsessed lyrics weren’t so speed-addled.”

Snapes says that seeing Charli’s “vulcanized stage presence” changed the way she viewed the songs, and the entire sound of the project. Plus, as our culture continues to crash and burn in spectacular ways, Snapes said that she has come to appreciate Charli’s music in a new way.

“And by 2019, the general collapse of society brought a new appeal to a record that sounds like a pep rally on the edge of a black hole,” she writes. “I was relieved to boot some of my old self-seriousness into that void. And as ever, Charli was ahead of her time, leaving me gratefully eating her dust. Beep beep!”