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Charli XCX’s Everything Is Romantic: How a Vulnerable Track Became Brat’s Unexpected Moment

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Charli XCX’s Everything Is Romantic: How a Vulnerable Track Became Brat’s Unexpected Moment

Charli XCX’s Everything Is Romantic is the quiet rush at the centre of Brat, a track that turns club power into diaristic detail.

While early conversation gravitated to “360” and “Von Dutch,” it is this tender cut that has quietly become the era’s most emotionally resonant moment.

Nearly a year after the remix album, the song is surging again on the back of a Wuthering Heights teaser and fresh discourse around Taylor Swift’s “Actually Romantic.”

What Makes “Everything Is Romantic” Different

“Everything Is Romantic” stands apart from Brat’s more aggressive club sound. The song feels like flipping through a travel diary, full of little details; bad tattoos on sun-kissed skin, church bells in the distance, a plastic Jesus on a dashboard, tilt into euphoria.

At 3:23, the track lets drums step forward, then soften, so strings and pads can bloom around the vocal. The verses snap like camera shutters capturing fleeting moments, while the hook repeats until it casts a spell.

Official credits for the album version list Charli XCX, A. G. Cook, El Guincho, Jae Deal, Jasper Harris, and Marlonwiththeglasses, and the official lyric video underscores the song’s plain-sight romance.

Caroline Polachek’s feature on the 2024 remix leans even more vaporous, her phrasing blurring the song’s edges into something like sodium-lit mist.

The remix appears on Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat, which extended the track’s life deep into 2025.

Three Reasons for the Current Spike of Charli XCX’s Everything Is Romantic

1) The Wuthering Heights connection
 Warner’s Wuthering Heights teaser prominently uses “Everything Is Romantic,” which reframes the track as windswept Gothic pop and confirms Charli’s broader musical involvement with the film. Fan edits multiplied within days of the teaser.

2) The Caroline Polachek remix’s afterlife
 The remix album kept the song circulating, with the Polachek duet functioning like the same melody seen through fog. That slow burn has continued across platforms since late 2024.

3) The Taylor Swift speculation
 On 3 October 2025, Taylor Swift released “Actually Romantic.” In her Amazon Music intro, widely reported by mainstream outlets, she broke it down as discovering a one-sided, adversarial fixation, which supercharged fan theories linking the song back to Charli’s Brat universe. Coverage and commentary helped push catalogue play for Charli XCX.

The Numbers

Two things tell the story here. “Sympathy Is a Knife” saw a massive 355% spike on October 3rd, hitting around 500,000 daily streams on Spotify, according to Chart Data and community tracking.

Meanwhile, Charli XCX’s Everything Is Romantic has jumped 622% in streams over the last month, per Luminate data reported by Billboard.

Charli XCX’s Everything Is Romantic: What the Song Actually Says

Strip away the drama and there’s something way more interesting going on. “Everything Is Romantic” isn’t about a person at all; it’s about paying attention.

Charli lists off these small, physical details in real time until everything clicks into focus. Romance isn’t just candlelight and smoke.

It’s shifting gears on a back road, some stranger’s terrible tattoo, sunlight hitting a dingy gas station sign.

The production does the same thing, taking one simple loop and letting it build into this glowing, hypnotic thing. You can hear it clearly in both the album version and the lyric video.

A Roadmap for New Listeners

For those discovering the track now, its evolution mirrors a fan’s own journey. The most common path begins with the album version, where the song’s core idea that romance is found in minute, observed details is built around that hypnotic, building production.

From there, many listeners gravitate to the Caroline Polachek remix, a vaporish duet that feels like hearing the same memory in a dream. 

The track’s cinematic quality is then fully realised in the Wuthering Heights teaser, where the refrain is weaponised into a theme for doomed, windswept love.

This natural progression from intimate confession to cinematic sweep is precisely why the song has such enduring legs, and why audiences continue to find new layers in it well into 2025.

The Swift of It All: Context

The recent surge of interest is inextricably linked to the world of pop superstar Taylor Swift, a figure often placed in a perceived rivalry with Charli XCX by fans. The connection is both personal and musical:

Quick timeline for anyone lost: Taylor Swift and Matty Healy (frontman of the band The 1975) dated briefly in spring 2023.

Charli XCX married The 1975’s drummer, George Daniel, in 2025. This intertwined social circle is the petri dish in which fan theories have grown.

On Brat‘s “Sympathy Is a Knife,” Charli sings about feeling insecure around another artist, “I don’t wanna share the space, I don’t wanna force a smile… Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show / Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.” Charli’s been clear the song is about her own anxiety, not a diss track.

But there’s also genuine mutual respect here. Swift told New York Magazine/Vulture in August 2024 that she’s “been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities… she takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect.”

Charli also addressed an old Reputation tour quote back in 2019, clarifying she meant no shade with that “waving to five-year-olds” comment.

Then came October 3rd, 2025. Swift dropped “Actually Romantic,” and fans immediately heard it as a response to Brat. 

In her Amazon Music commentary, Swift described it as realising someone’s had a “one-sided, adversarial relationship” with you—that you’ve been “living in their head rent-free.” That poured gasoline on the theories.

Fans dissected lyrical callbacks and visual nods. Mainstream outlets ran with the speculation.

Two days later, Charli posted a brief studio clip with just a heart emoji. The press called it a “back in the lab” move. We’ll see what comes next.

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