“Crash” by Charli XCX Debuts at No. 7 on Billboard 200

Charli XCX sees her highest-charting album yet as her latest release “Crash” debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200, Billboard reported.

The English singer-songwriter has not had consistent success on Billboard charts since her first appearance on the chart in 2013.

She posted a photo of herself on Instagram with the caption “my album went top 10 in the USA. number 7 to be precise. literally gagged.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cbsj3ZDJhxz/

Billboard magazine publishes numerous charts, some genre or nation-specific such as “Dance Club Songs” or “Billboard Japan Hot 100.”

Her five most recent albums have appeared on the Billboard 200, a weekly record chart ranking the 200 most popular music albums and EPs in the United States. Her 2015 album “Sucker” peaked at No. 28, followed by albums peaking at 175 in 2017, 42 in 2019 and 111 in 2020, Billboard data shows.

The artist has had four songs on The Hot 100, the music industry standard chart for songs in the United States; however, the most recent time was January 2015 when her song “Break The Rules” peaked at 91, according to Billboard data.

This comes after she told the New York Times that this was her “last, most packaged push for pop stardom.”

“For me, there’s always been this eternal question of, like, could I be the biggest artist in the world,” Charli XCX told the New York Times, “or am I not made for it? Am I too weird, too left, too opinionated, too unlikable, too different looking, whatever, whatever, whatever?”

Musically, the album is dance-pop with some 80s elements that make for catchy melodies and beats matched with catchy lyrics. Jack Busscher, a 22-year-old “sometimes fan” from the Milwaukee area thinks it’s a step up from previous albums.

“I got into it because I’ve seen a lot of TikToks about it and they really intrigued me with the sound,” Busscher said.

This is her fifth and final album with Atlantic Records, which she signed with in 2008 at 16 years old, according to the Atlantic Records website.

The 29-year-old singer is currently on tour in the US (with one show in Canada) that began in Oakland, California on March 26 and will end in Chicago on April 29, according to her website.

“I’m truly in my sellout era,” she said in an Instagram story on Tuesday, March 29. “The first two nights in Oakland on the ‘Crash’ tour sold out, tonight in Portland is sold out, San Diego is sold out…”

Tickets are still available for the show in Chicago for $254 each, according to the Live Nation website.

Charli XCX will also be performing at Summerfest July 8, the final weekend of the music festival, and at Lollapalooza in Chicago later in July, according to the music festivals’ websites.

The album was released March 18 and hit No. 1 in Australia and the UK, where she was born, according to Billboard.

Spotify data shows that “Crash” ranks 18 in the USA and 33 globally. 

“As a strategy, it’s masterfully smart: She gets to poke fun at the artificialities of celebrity and the big, bad label machine in an extremely Charli way, while firing out songs with the potential to become gargantuan hits,” Julyssa Lopez wrote for Rolling Stone.

But not everyone sees this new album as artistically.

Claire Davidson, a freelance writer for Slate wrote an article with the headline “When Pop’s Most Visionary Star Goes Commercial, No One Wins.”

After releasing the album, Charli XCX posted on Instagram wearing a crop-top that says “They don’t build statues of critics” with the caption “they don’t, but thanks for all the hot reviews anyways.”