Photo: Tyrell Hampton
Out today on Atlantic Records
How to follow an album like Brat? British pop star Charli xcx catapulted to global superstar status with her 2024 release and the biggest, brattiest meme in living memory – an entire sound, style and sentiment signified by an acid-green square. Cigs and electro-house and clubbing, and being a bit messy and chaotic, no fucks given – this was the brash world and persona that the songwriter gifted us. Take your bra off and jump in. And we did, for what felt like forever: “Brat summer” became seemingly endless and Kamala Harris used the album’s visuals to fuel her presidential campaign. Cool quickly became cliche. So what was next?
In the intervening years, Charli soundtracked a major Hollywood film (Wuthering Heights), starred in seven of her own – including a mockumentary, The Moment, deconstructing her bizarre meta relationship to sudden fame – and is rarely spotted away from the frow. As a recent Dazed profile put it, the question is now: “What can’t Charli xcx be?” Her polymathery is something she directly addresses with her latest album, Music, Fashion, Film (her seventh but it feels like her second). In an accompanying video, she offers by way of explanation: “Well, I love music and I love fashion and I love film … they’re so intrinsically what my life is about.” On the cover: an arty black-and-white shot of John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese.
Much was made in the lead-up to the album about this being Charli xcx’s rock reinvention, having left the nightclub behind. Indeed, on Rock Music, one of the album’s lead singles, she teasingly says: “I think the dancefloor is dead / So now we’re making rock music.” This isn’t strictly accurate, as Charli herself has since clarified: rather, the signifiers of rock – distortion, big riffage, a general heaviness – are grafted on to her existing deadpan pop songs, acting as textural punctuation rather than expanding the form. There are echoes of the Strokes’ driving guitars (whose own new album is also out today), power-pop, the Cure and emo. But by and large this is indie sleaze churned through a stuttering, spluttering machine and whirled into its own intense epic. To give you an idea of references, one song is simply titled “2007”.
Some bait still-a-bad-girl lines about sleeping with someone’s dad jostle for space with musings that she’s grown up now and wears trousers instead of going knickerless
Inhaled in one go, Music, Fashion, Film is a short, sharp, 29-minute joyride. In a way, that makes it the perfect confection to come after Brat – a sonic evolution, songs written in time snatched between catwalk shows and film premieres, bang it out and don’t overthink it. But often they feel like bursts of ideas that might have better soundtracked a fashion show or punctuated a film scene: an audio LinkedIn that’s signposting her career path to the next magnum opus. Not that Charli and her co-producers here, AG Cook and Finn Keane, have ever been ones to stick to any so-called songwriting rules. Songs halt abruptly. They play with sound, poke at its structure, and have an obsession with puckering every melody like a level falling away in a video game, one jump out of reach. One track, Card Declined – surely the doomiest, most depresso song about a shopping spree – drops into a seemingly completely different number towards the end. The album’s masterstroke is Yeah, a deconstructed garage-rocker that revolves around few words and kicks in with widescreen distortion in the chorus when Charli gives the cue “now I wanna feel it”.
The album cover for Music, Fashion, Film
While most people with her schedule would be booking the next first-class flight to an idyllic beach paradise at the first opportunity, Charli xcx has said that she felt inspiration strike and started writing new material because she had something to say. She scratches at her insecurities about not being a good enough wife, or about being selfish, on the claustrophobic I’m Afraid. On the Lolita pop-rock of Wink Wink, some bait still-a-bad-girl lines about sleeping with someone’s dad jostle for space with musings that she’s grown up now and wears trousers instead of going knickerless. On SS26, she takes aim at artists, including herself, using their politics and heritage to sell themselves. Ultimately, she admits to being superficial: “Can’t hide the fact I’d rather take the easy road / Yeah I think I’ll be alright if I look good in the clothes”. Camera is another diaristic, quite plainly direct, song about craving it all: “I can be anything I want to be / And I can feel the things I don’t normally feel”.
It’s reaching for something deeper, but feels held back by the overarching tone of shallow as profound. She leans into the latter a little more on the album closer No One Lasts Forever, which seems to illustrate the overarching theme best: “the crushing highs and lows of ego”. The track includes excerpts from a rather psychedelic conversation with film director David Cronenberg – in honour of whom Charli named her 2022 album Crash – talking about the meaning of longevity and ultimately assuring her nihilistically that “oblivion is freedom”. If everything is nonsense, then – if “the world is gonna end” and we’re just “walking on a runway that goes straight to hell” and “nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film” – then you may as well seize the moment while you can. All 29 minutes of it.
Kate Hutchinson is the Nerve's music critic. A writer and broadcaster, she’s behind the audio series The Last Bohemians, and the 2025 music podcast Studio Radicals, which Radio Times called "podcasting at its best". She currently presents a fortnightly show on Soho Radio.