Charli XCX is back where she belongs. On the dance floor.

Till now. On her new album, “Brat,” the 31-year-old singer-songwriter is headed to the location of her inventive inception and the place the place she appears most snug: the membership, with a Serato filled with serotonin. And after the ups and downs of greater than a decade within the music trade, it looks like she’s lastly dwelling.

If “Brat” is dwelling, then Charli is the architect and designer. Over time, she has created a private sphere of affect in pop, each as a songwriter for different stars and a sonic blueprint for a complete subgenre, hyperpop, on the mainstream’s margins. In each the textual content and rollout of “Brat,” she’s began to populate that world with a solid of characters, comparable to celeb muse Julia Fox, who pops up in her music video, DJ set, entourage and lyrics. “I’m all over the place, I’m so Julia,” Charli sings on “360,” the opening monitor on “Brat,” and a mission assertion: “I’m your favourite reference, child.”

That’s all the time been a theme in Charli’s lyrics, the place she paints herself — with fake-it-til-you-make-it grandeur — as an icon, as primary, as a fantasy, as an object of obsession and jealousy. However for the primary time, she is reckoning with the psychological toll of measuring your self-worth by way of Billboard charts and towards trade frenemies, particularly when life-or-death intrudes on clubland fantasies.

All through “Brat,” Charli and her producers maintain the album from veering throughout the sonic median, as was usually the case on 2019’s “Charli.” As an alternative, the album keys in on the dance ground nostalgia of the most effective songs on 2022’s “Crash,” leaning into mutating synths, wobbly bass strains and nonstop percussion drawn from the dance music continuum, particularly the genres popularized within the British golf equipment the place she got here of age. These are the sounds and scenes nodded to amid the heart-pumping disequilibrium of “Membership Classics,” on which Charli name-drops whose tracks (aside from her personal) she desires to listen to on an evening out: scene-leaders comparable to A.G. Cook dinner, Hudson Mohawke and Sophie.

Sophie, an iconic and influential dance producer who died in 2021 at 34, will get the highlight on the transferring “So I.” As an alternative of a sentimental paean, Charli interrogates her relationship along with her good friend and collaborator. “Would you want this one?” she wonders, “Perhaps just a bit bit?,” capturing the sense of unanswered questions that accompany grief.

That’s not the one time “Brat” will get private. On the surprisingly poignant “I give it some thought on a regular basis,” Charli’s conversational lyrics shift the FOMO from the membership to the crib, placing parenthood in perspective: “Ought to I cease my contraception? As a result of my profession feels so small within the existential scheme of all of it.”

Whereas these lyrics present a susceptible aspect, Charli is hitting her peak as a proponent of occasion lady life and occasions. The dangerous tattoos and plastic Jesus Christ indicators of “Every thing is romantic” evoke the songs of Lana Del Rey, if she spent extra time in Naples, Italy, than Naples, Fla. Lana is there once more — this time in Charli’s Airpods —on “Imply Ladies,” a hands-in-the-air anthem a few coquette with a “razor-sharp tongue caught to skinny cigarettes.” Much more evocatively, a French manicured fingertip wipes out cocaine residue on nearer “365,” a sinister sister monitor to “360” that toys with the double that means of how the tracks “bump” within the evening.

By the point the “Mortal Kombat” synths of “365” fade out, some listeners might be tempted to rewind “Brat” and play it from the highest: One other full circle second for a pop star who has embraced the cult classics — if not finest sellers — on which she’s constructed her basis.