A glitch-influenced indie dance song, "Girl, So Confusing" is built on talk-sing Auto-Tune vocals and a throbbing bassline.
Shaad D'Souza then wrote that the track was "sure to send Deuxmoi and Discord servers into overdrive" as it "finds Charli singing about the fraught relationship she has with an unnamed female artist".
[1] She later clarified on her TikTok account that Brat did not contain any "diss tracks", with the exception of the album's lead single, "Von Dutch" (2024).
[2] The singer wrote the song as a way to explore the nuanced and complex relationships female pop artists are expected to maintain between one another in the limelight.
[5] The following year, the pair's relationship was reported to be damaged due to a feud between Sawayama and the 1975 frontman Matty Healy.
[8] In 2016, Charli XCX released a series of fruit-themed photos, shot by photographer Charlotte Rutherford, for an advertisement campaign with British fragrance company Impulse.
Diamandis, who had previously worked with Rutherford, wrote on Charli XCX's Instagram account, "This Froot looks familiar", which became a meme phrase.
[11] The artist's aesthetic and physical features were compared by media outlets to those of Charli,[12] who also released her debut album True Romance that same year and achieved mainstream success with her 2012 collaboration "I Love It" with Swedish synth-pop duo Icona Pop.
[16] "Girl, So Confusing" has been described as a glitch-influenced indie dance song[17][18] built on talk-sing Auto-Tune vocals and a throbbing bassline.
[19][20] The New York Times writer Lindsay Zoladz wrote that the production had a "strobe-lit beat",[21] while Pitchfork's Meaghan Garvey called the song "sparkly" and "scuzzy".
[22] Charli XCX's vocals were compared to those of American-French singer Uffie by PopMatters editor Nick Malone, describing them as having a "husky timbre" before changing into "unimaginably catchy spirals.
During an interview with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang for their Las Culturistas podcast, Charli XCX affirmed that while she respects the growing companionship between female artists in pop music, she also sees the nuances between said relationships: "I don't think you become a bad feminist if you maybe don't see eye to eye with every single woman.
[41] Lorde stated that writing her verse for the remix led her to feel "deep empathy" for Charli XCX, but "misunderstood" with a sense of urgency to "make it right" between the two.
[3] The remix expands on the original track's discussion of complex and competitive dynamics within female friendships,[43][2] jealousy,[44] insecurities,[45] and rivalry,[46] and provides an answer from Lorde, who explores her struggles with body image,[47] disordered eating,[48] and self-confidence on her verse.
[50] Clash declared the remix an "inversion" of the original, calling it a "celebration of female energy and a condemnation of the aspects that keep women apart.
noted that the remix reframed the original track's "nervy monologue into a healing and surprisingly affecting dialogue between two left-field pop stars who've been pitted against one another" since their adolescent years.
[48] The lyrics were described by The New York Times as being "mutually messy risk-taking, honest reckoning with the fun-house mirrors of fame and conflict resolution you can dance to.
Vulture's Jason P. Frank and Alejandra Gularte wrote that Lorde's verse "fits directly into the world of Brat" due to its honesty.
's Kaelen Bell selected it as one of the publication's staff picks, stating that it was a "watershed moment" amid the "anodyne therapy and straining empowerment" prevalent in the "last decade of pop music".