Charli XCX’s latest mixtape Pop 2 is an adventurous step away from safe and formulaic pop music

Charli XCX’s second mixtape of 2017, Pop 2, arrived accompanied by a short explanatory note addressed to the artists’ fans – “I was so lost for a while with who I was … f*** playing the game” – and an interview in which she announced she might never bother releasing a “proper” album again.

Her frustration is understandable. During the past decade, she’s had a couple of huge hit singles, written a couple more for other artists and collaborated with everyone from Rita Ora to Blondie to James Blunt, but she’s remained a slightly marginal presence within pop’s glittering firmament.

Perhaps her failure to connect has something to do with latter-day pop music itself. The top 40 is largely delivered and consumed via streaming services, which seems to have both slowed it down – there were singles in last week’s chart that have been lurking around since last summer – and narrowed its range.

The murky business of playlist curation in an age when playlists seem to have replaced radio as the means by which people access new music, the way “if you like that, you’ll like this” algorithms work, the sense that artists might feel pressured to make music that isn’t too disruptive lest it jolt the more passive listener into fast-forwarding to something else: all of it appears to have resulted in a more homogenous chart, with anything too out-of-the-ordinary shunted to the peripheries.

In part, the point of Pop 2 seems to be to demonstrate by example that there’s literally a world of more interesting pop music out there, currently not reflected by the charts. The list of guest artists features big hitters – Carly Rae Jepsen’s voice floats over the increasingly deranged, Moroder-esque synth line of opener Backseat – and a host of Charli XCX’s fellow pop outliers: Tove Lo, MØ, Mykki Blanco and Caroline Polachek of the perennially underrated Chairlift.

But it’s the least well-known names that give you the most pause and pay testament to Charli XCX’s skills as a talent-spotter.