As predicted by Charli XCX, working with Lorde on a remixed version of “Girl, so confusing” indeed made the “internet go crazy.” And, it also touched one of Charli’s earliest friends, Marina, who shared that she teared up while listening to the two singers work through their differences on the track.
“This is beautiful. Just cried listening to it,” wrote Marina on X Friday. “It’s so courageous and humans to make work about this topic and it’s so healing to listen to it. Congratulations on an iconic album @charli_xcx.”
Soon after, Charli XCX responded to the tweet, writing, “Aww marina!! tumblr girls rise!” In reply, Marina wrote, “Crying <3 <3 <3.”
On “Girl, so confusing,” Charli sings about her insecure tendencies around her “awkward” relationship with Lorde, with whom she doesn’t “have much in common” besides being two of the internet’s favorite artists. “We talk about making music/ But I don’t know if it’s honest,” sings Charli.
The exchange between Marina and Charli also seems to capture the pair publicly burying the hatchet after a falling out in 2016 over a photoshoot. At the time, Marina wrote, “That FROOT looks familiar,” a phrase that has now become a meme among stan groups for both artists, under a photo that looked similar to Marina’s promo pictures for Froot, which dropped the year prior.
At the time, Marina followed the comment by tweeting, “Imagery is artistic property. Please respect your fellow artists.” In response, Charli issued a statement defending herself for the photo and for working with the same photographer as Marina: “I’m not here to replicate or ‘steal’ art… What’s the point in that?”
Before the falling out, the pair worked together on a song called “Just Desserts” in 2013 that was never officially released but is available on the pair’s YouTube channels. Charli also opened for Marina on the Lonely Hearts Club Tour that year.
Last year, on her @360_brat Instagram, Charli responded to a comment and shared that the pair were not friends but that she had felt “honestly really hurt and upset and confused” by Marina’s decision to call her out on social media at the time.
“I just felt like she knew she was sending people to ‘get me’ online and as someone I looked up to I just thought that was really a mean thing to do at the time,” Charli wrote. “Now I’m just like lol the whole thing is so funny like as if there was a beef over lemons.”
Because of the fruit-related history, fans joked on X Friday that the pair of artists should, like Charli and Lorde did, “work things out” on a remix of Charli’s song “Apple.” Marina also followed Charli on social media following the sweet exchange.
Marina is set to release a poetry book titled Eat the World in October and told Rolling Stone in April she’s been writing new music but hadn’t “started producing anything yet.”
“The book has allowed me the space to be able to explore thing I wasn’t happy about myself in a way that I just don’t think I could have with music,” she said.