She’s partying on you, with you, and in a music video. Charli XCX released the music video for her song “party 4 u,” perhaps the unlikeliest hit of the year, on May 15. In the evocative, nonlinear music video — directed by Mitch Ryan — Charli wanders around a post-party home in a polka-dot dress, intercut with extreme close-ups of her face. Then she walks outside, discards her Louboutins, smokes a cig, and strips down to her underwear, before finally arriving at a billboard of her face, which she sets on fire. How bratty.
It’s now five years to the date since “party 4 u” came out, on How I’m Feeling Now, Charli’s 2020 album that was a collaboration with her fans and one of the first major works in any art form about the COVID pandemic. It only peaked at No. 111 on the “Billboard 200” at the time, but, Charli has gone full headliner (and worn the sash to prove it) since then, which means “party 4 u” is a defining hit of 2025.
“How I’m Feeling Now turns 5 years old tomorrow … it honestly just feels like yesterday,” Charli wrote on her Instagram on May 14, ahead of the music video’s release. “So much has changed since then. Me, my life, elements of my music and most definitely the world. I made the album in just 5 weeks, from conception to release, entirely publicly in collaboration with all of you. It was so special. I felt like I rediscovered myself, my sanity + my sense of connection with the world, at a time where we were all so alone. To create with all of you helped me feel okay.”
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Fans first heard “party 4 u” in 2017, when Charli played it on tour in Japan and a recording circulated through online Charli fandoms, though it was not officially released until 2020 on How I’m Feeling Now. Since then, it has had a slow rise to prominence: It was featured in Bottoms’s credits, then it was the focus of two separate TikTok trends this year, one of which focused on people’s ability to lip-sync the quick-paced verse and the second of which was basically a creative-writing assignment about the bridge. Now, it has been viewed over 5 billion times on TikTok, per a press release, and peaked on the “Billboard Hot 100” at No. 55 and is still rising. The track also closed out the shows on her Brat arena tour, with Charli whipping around a glowing light beam as she sang. From one girl making an album in her house to 20,000 people singing along live? More like “party 4 us.”
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