‘All I Could Smell Were Poppers’

This article was originally published on February 23, 2024. We’re recirculating it now with the release of Charlie XCX’s Brat.

A selection of Bushwick’s best and brightest is not-so-patiently waiting to be let into an unidentified warehouse where the party of the year (or at least the month) is being held: Charli XCX, music’s brattiest pop star, is doing her first live appearance for Boiler Room, the club promoter and music platform known for its sweaty, viral DJ sets.

“I’m not getting in,” someone with pink hair shouts. “I’m on the list, but …” Elsewhere, fans who just met are Venn diagramming their musical interests, finding common ground between Carly Rae Jepsen and Erika de Casier. A discussion unfolds about whether everybody who has a ticket is VIP (they aren’t). “I just need to go to the left and tell them that I am,” one girl says, without appearing to understand how VIP works.

You can forgive people for thinking they qualify as special by virtue of just having tickets, given how much Charli’s performance seems to have infected the city’s gay population. Allegedly, hers is the most coveted set in Boiler Room history (25,000 RSVPs for about 1,000 invitations that each came with a plus-one). Earlier in the week, one fan tweeted that they knew people who were RSVP-ing as nonbinary to have a better chance of entry. Another said they “just want everyone attending charli xcx boiler room to know that I deserve to be there more than you.” The now-L.A.-based DJ Ty Sunderland wondered if it would be crazy to fly cross-country for 24 hours just to attend. (Charli’s team tells me that anyone who got in through the RSVP site was simply chosen through a lottery.) All that FOMO is being quenched by the mini-XCX economy that has sprouted up around it with multiple gigs being thrown for those who missed out on the main event. One is a drag show, another is “Parti XCX,” organized “for the hundreds who didn’t make it in + Charli show after party.”

Photo: Lea Garn

The frenzy is notable for Charli, who has made a career out of being an acquired taste. After early hits like “Boom Clap,” she pivoted to the burgeoning hyperpop scene, collaborating with producers like SOPHIE and A.G. Cook. Her music is both a bratty sugar rush and a vast electronic expanse, and she helped usher in the current era of what the New York Times has called pop’s middle class. She’s not as popular as Dua Lipa, but the fact that you won’t hear Charli’s music in a supermarket makes stans feel special. While she works with mega pop stars (she helped write Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello’s “Señorita” and was rumored to be working with Britney Spears on her new music), Charli’s own album releases have a certain mischievousness — her promo is intentionally annoying and functions as a commentary on fame. (Earlier this year, she put out a video of her trendy friends reading her label’s promo ideas, including one in which she shoplifts.)

By the time I enter the warehouse, Charli’s opening DJ, Doss, is playing rave music to a small crowd. Some fans are lined up at the bar to purchase the night’s signature drink: a pomegranate cosmo that’s as sickeningly sweet as Charli’s best songs. Others are milling about outside for a smoke break and heading into a photo booth painted with the words “Party Girl” in honor of the set. Each of the bathroom doors has one character drawn on it to spell out “360 Brat,” the handle of Charli’s popular finsta. The crowd is a Where’s Waldo of the gay famous. I see Ira Madison III of Keep It, TikToker Blizzy Maguire, and Linux, the self-proclaimed New York “It” girl who got into trouble last Halloween for wearing a fat suit. Drag Race winner Aquaria, in a mohawk, is taking fan selfies. The informal dress code appears to be the lamest version of Y2K you can imagine (tiny glasses, eyebrow piercings) worn ironically but fashionably. Despite the claims of those “ins and outs” lists shared on social media at the end of 2023, Elf Bars are omnipresent, though I do see one boy going vintage by hitting a Juul.

I soon spot Sunderland, who ended up pulling the trigger on that plane ticket after getting a DM from Charli. He’s wearing his trademark black-and-white hat with a vintage Hilary Duff tee. “All these people were freaking out about getting tickets, but I knew I could get in,” he says. “I had to remind the Bushwick girls that I am the Bushwick girl.” (Later that night, Ty tweets that he is at the “Bushwick met gala”).

Photo: Lea Garn

While dancing, I talk to William, who has Charli wallpaper on his phone and tells me he entered a contest run by an energy-drink company in an attempt to get tickets but didn’t win (he eventually got in thanks to his friend). In line for the bathroom, Pete, wearing a jacket embroidered with sequined dice, says they got theirs thanks to a friend who worked on a movie Charli’s going to be in. By ten o’clock, the crowd begins to part, and as we wait for whatever’s about to happen, I talk to two fans, Alex and Ally, who say the audience feels handpicked (but they’re also not sure how the ticket decisions could have happened). Alex notes that almost everybody looks 25 to 35 and queer or gender fluid. “There are no normies,” he says. “Nobody’s in a polo.”

At 10:07, the guest of the hour makes her way to the DJ booth, entourage in tow. Her set includes a slew of hits from her own catalogue (“Vroom Vroom,” her upcoming single “Von Dutch”) and Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money.” Charli also performs unreleased songs, including “Get Into It (Spring Breakers).” Other “It” girls soon join her: Julia Fox inaudibly performs, and Addison Rae, the TikToker turned half-ironically stanned pop star, dances on the booth to “2 Die 4,” which gets the loudest reception of the night.

The audience is both thrilled to be there and surprisingly tame — they treat Charli’s set more like a concert than a rave. Maybe it’s just too early or maybe the general populace are just Angels (the name of Charli’s fan army) without Boiler Room experience, but the night is low on seediness and high on Instagrammability. A boy double-fists phones, one recording the set, the other broadcasting on Instagram Live. Multiple people are FaceTiming friends who couldn’t get in. In front of me, Rosanna, an East Londoner in an olive-green skirt, is dancing on an overturned plastic tub she just found. When I tell her I’m a reporter, she asks if I’m going to refer to her as “the fag hag on the tub.”

Photo: Lea Garn

And then, the show everybody was so desperate to get into is … over? The lights come on and the audience looks as if it just woke up. It’s 11:24 p.m. “It can’t be over,” someone in a mullet says to their friend. I ask two people near me, who didn’t arrive until 11 p.m., if they think the set is finished. “The bartenders say ‘no,’” Tej tells me. “But the people with the mops say it is.”

Slowly, fans come to terms with how the night has to continue elsewhere. As I’m standing on line to get my coat, I watch a group near me sharing hits of poppers, which earns an eye roll from a girl in a tight pink dress. “There was a point when all I could smell were poppers,” she tells her friend. But not everyone seems annoyed by the early end time. “It’s not even midnight. That’s so amazing,” says someone leaving the venue in a babushka. The next day, I see a viral TikTok of “Vroom Vroom” filmed from outside the club. One of the commenters notes, “It looks like they are creating their own weather in there.”