Charli XCX has revealed that she cut costs on the cover art for her album Brat.
The British singer has revealed that she didn’t think fans would like the low-budget cover art before it went viral.
In a new interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Charli explained how the album cover, which features a lime green background and blurry lowercase text, came about.
“Where the actual first idea of doing a text cover came from was to save money,” the Guess hitmaker said. “I was like, ‘This album is not going to appeal to a lot of people.'”
Charli said that instead of spending money on an elaborate cover shoot, she decided to do something simple and use the funds elsewhere.
“I was like, ‘I think I will do a press shoot and then maybe we just save on the album cover,'” she told Zane, adding that her team tried to tell her that the lowercase text was “the stupidest idea ever”.
The 365 singer added that her manager Brandon Creed told her that the shade of green she chose was “really hard to look at”, which only encouraged her further.
Despite the negative feedback from her team and friends, Charli was confident she had made the right choice for her album, which was released in June.
“This actually is really good. It actually feels like it very much embodies the word ‘brat’ to kind of not be there because that is sort of less of the norm, I suppose, for female artists,” the singer said. “That felt punchy. The pixilation makes it looks like it’s kind of been done in this rush… you didn’t get the proper hi-res file… I knew it would generate this conversation.”
Charli noted that while some fans might be “disappointed” with the art, it was important to her that people were talking about it.
