The Genius of Charli XCX

The last time a Charli XCX album appeared—her sixth studio album, by the evocative title of Brat—the Club was ascendant. By that, I mean not a specific club but that quasi-mythological space, known to humankind for at least a century, where you dance away your emotional burdens into the wee hours of the morning. Here, as a Russian clubgoer once famously observed, “The ladies look good, the alcohol is flowing. There is much pain in the world, but not in this room.” That summer, in the not-so-distant year of 2024, Kamala Harris was projected to win the upcoming presidential election, fans and marketers declared Charli’s album to be the sound of the season, and “Brat Summer” was born, screaming, into a world that promised to be a little less chaotic.

Of course, we know how 2024 ended. Two years later, at the end of another record-breaking summer, Charli has given us something new: Music, Fashion, Film, an album whose title seems to gesture toward carefree living. But that would be too easy, I think. The album appears in the second year of another interminable Trump presidency, full of the nothing-signifying sound and fury that his return to office has wrought, and it sounds nothing like its predecessor. Of course, our sociopolitical vibes are different these days as well.

But, thank God, so is the music. Despite featuring a couple of the same producers who appeared on Brat—A.G. Cook and Finn Keane—the album is vastly different: It sounds, in a word, like rock. Its title also hints at something else: Charli’s renewed focus on her creative ventures outside of music. In addition to being the Club’s princess, she’s one of the faces of Saint Laurent and an actress appearing in more and more independent films. That Charli is less well-known in these domains appears to have given her some productive creative anxiety, pushing her music in new directions in the process. “I think the dance floor is dead / So now we’re making rock music,” she sings in the title track. And the rest of the album lives up to that promise.

As an artist, Charli XCX has always been great at making meaning out of the prevailing cultural currents: Brat Summer only happened because the public finally caught up with her. Which is what is fascinating about a track like “SS26,” one of Music, Fashion, Film’s singles and among the best songs on the album. Here’s the chorus, which finds Charli dispensing a terminal diagnosis for an uncertain world:

Spring, Summer ’26
When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it
Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell
Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion, or film.

It’s unusually straightforward songwriting, and it’s not hard to feel that Charli is correct once again: As governments around the world continue their inexorable rightward slide; as Europe, Canada, and the western United States are consumed by intense wildfires; as the American president continues to send fuel prices spiraling globally, it’s getting harder to deny that hell is real and that, as a great writer once said, it is other people.

But with that last line in mind (“Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion, or film”), it is, I think, easier to read the thrust of the new album: that our outlets of escape can’t save us. A little later in the song, Charli has some even sharper words for the culture. “Think my politics could work as a press strategy / And my heritage could give me quite the USP [unique selling point, in marketing-speak] / Can’t hide the fact that I’d rather take the easy road,” she sings. Me too, girl. If escaping into art is no longer enough, what is? Charli doesn’t give an answer for the rest of us, but she does provide one for herself, the last line of the verse: “Yeah, I think I’ll be all right if I look good in the clothes.” Obviously, she doesn’t believe it. But sung as sweetly as it is, over a pop-punkish bass line, a digital snare hit, and a tastefully minimal guitar, the song goes down easy.

Music, Fashion, Film gets darker as it goes on. To a set of grunge-y guitars that could come straight from a late-aughts alt-rock album, backed by MPC -style digital beats, Charli gives us songs about her bedroom-pop-star days (“2007”), about how she can buy everything but a new life (“Card Declined”), and about her fear of ruining the best relationship in her life because of her own bad self (“I’m Afraid”). That’s a lot of self-disclosure, and in other hands it might feel maudlin—too vulnerable, too eager—but here the feelings are finely worked. It’s emotional vulnerability as a necessity, not as a marketing strategy (though it could be that too, of course).

“Do I wanna make music?” Charli asks in the middle of “Camera,” a song that’s largely about contemplating a career change. “Am I being fuckin’ stupid / If I try to be a girl on the screen when I’m turning thirty-four? / But all I know is how it makes me feel.” It’s refreshingly honest; she’s a narrator you can trust.

Still, the music’s fun, and I’m a sucker for depressing lyrics set to fun music. The tunes are spare in places, with seemingly simple instrumentation—but you can tell that a lot of thought went into the arrangements. Cook and Keane do a lot with what feels like a little, and it’s magic. Another notable thing: Charli sings without AutoTune, in a voice that’s minimally processed. It’s another sign that she’s moving forward.

Plus these songs have an outsize life and energy to them. Music, Fashion, Film isn’t all interiority: “2007” is a romp through the past, a reminder of how much fun it was to make music in your bedroom before the fame set in. “Magic Metal Montana,” on the other hand, swaps bouncy lyrics for poignant ones, as it’s a song to her friend and collaborator A.G. Cook. Its sweetest moment comes when she says, “I think you taught me, I think I taught you / You believe me, I believe you”—an expression of trust you don’t find in most love songs. And “Rock Music” is a fun night out with friends, with everyone having a good time as they feel their way through the moment.

If there’s a thesis statement on Music, Fashion, Film, it’s probably “No One Lasts Forever,” which is a reminder from Charli—to herself, to the world—that no matter what happens, no matter how much things change, no state of affairs can last forever, and none of us do either. The song is billed as “featuring David Cronenberg” because it has an extended snippet from an interview that she did with the famous body-horror director about a near-death experience he had; it’s the only featured appearance on the album.

“As I was lying there on the sidewalk,” Cronenberg says, “I did not think about art at all. I—I thought about people, I thought about life…. No, I was not thinking about art as endurance, as immortality. We can talk about immortal artists, and it can turn out that, yes, some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years…. And that’s fantastic. But experientially, for them, they are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that…. I really feel, and hear me assuring you, that oblivion is freedom.”

It’s a funny lesson to throw in at the end of what is ostensibly a pop album, but somehow it works. Oblivion is freedom, yes—from obligation, from the pressures of fame, from everything annoying that we can’t change but that nevertheless makes us who we are. The Club is dead—Charli says so herself. Perhaps it’s time to accept the things we can’t escape, about our lives and about ourselves. Perhaps it’s time to chart a new way forward.