Ten years ago today, Charli XCX hit the gas on a four-track project that would quietly, then loudly, change everything. Vroom Vroom, her 2016 EP made front-to-back with the late, visionary producer SOPHIE, turns 10 today, and its impact on pop, club music, and what we now call hyperpop is still rippling through everything.

The EP marked the first full collaborative project between Charli and SOPHIE, fusing Charli’s instinct for hooks with SOPHIE’s rubbery, metallic, cartoon-brutal production. Across just 12 minutes, they sketched out a future where pop could be industrial, abrasive, silly, and euphoric all at once: a blueprint that would help usher in the hyperpop explosion of the 2020s.

“Let’s ride,” Charli purrs at the start of the title track, and from there the EP doesn’t let up. A gleefully unhinged joyride built on revving synths, hydraulic bass, and lyrics about girls, cars, and winning that feel half-brat, half-manifestation. Vroom Vroom is a love letter to the club and to collaboration: a sudden supernova that expanded on the squelching, industrial textures Charli and SOPHIE had been experimenting with and pushed those sounds closer to the mainstream.

At the time, the EP was polarizing; too weird for some pop fans, too pop for some experimental heads, but in hindsight it’s been widely recognized as genre-defining, credited with helping to crack open space for the hyperpop scene that would flourish a few years later. SOPHIE’s fingerprints are everywhere: helium vocals, rubberized synths, and beats that feel like a rave inside a pinball machine, all wrapped around Charli’s increasingly fearless writing.

Live, “Vroom Vroom” has become a rite of passage. When Charli drops it in a set, the entire crowd snaps into formation, screaming every word and bracing for three minutes of chest-rattling chaos. It’s gone from cult favorite to canon… a track that separates casual listeners from Angels who’ve been here since the neon underground days.

A decade later, you can draw a straight line from Vroom Vroom to brat: the willingness to be loud, polarizing, and deeply online; the marriage of club aesthetics with razor-sharp pop instincts; the sense that pop doesn’t have to follow any rules except the artist’s own.

Today, celebrating Vroom Vroom turning 10 is really about honoring a moment where Charli XCX and SOPHIE looked at what pop was, and then floored it into what it could be.