Charli XCX's new album Music, Fashion, Film is a slippery search into selfhood that hits just as hard as Brat. After a decade trailblazing pop freedom from the genre's fringes, A-list success seemed like the thing that might finally trap her. Her 2024 club-rat opus Brat spawned memes, political bandwagoning, Collins' word of the year, and possible terminal damage to the bra industry. Its ludicrous cultural impact looked set to pickle her as a caricature of a Parliament-toting bad girl. The question of whether 'Brat summer' could last was so rife she turned it into a mockumentary, The Moment, making success look miserable.
Pivoting to Guitar and Meta Mastery
Even for a pop star renowned for reinvention, it put a higher price on her next move. Charli released the sub-two-minute single Rock Music, where she drawls over guitars that buzzed like speakers weathering interference from a Nokia 5110: 'I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we're making rock music.' The key to this cheeky song is surprisingly earnest: 'Jump off the stage / I hope they catch you today / But if they don't it's OK,' she sings naively, an affirmation to take creative leaps.
Music, Fashion, Film's prosaic title references Charli's recent turn towards acting and fashion collaborations. From the first singles, the bigger picture felt murky compared with Brat's excavation of anxieties around female relationships. She quickly protested that she wasn't really making rock music. The wistful SS26 dealt in slimy celebrity apologia; the addictive Wink Wink hat-tipped to 00s French indie sleazers the Teenagers as Charli pinky-promised that she was respectable now. These releases were intentionally diffuse, preventing Music, Fashion, Film from slipping out of Charli's control before it was even out.
Exploring Identity and Self-Commodification
That slipperiness turns out to be the essence of another gorgeously astute and disarmingly deep album about the instability of identity. Rock Music and SS26 explore self-definition: the defiant cultural reset; the celebrity scoundrel who dodges criticism by exploiting certain sympathies ('my heritage could give me quite the USP'). On Card Declined's blunt, fuzzed-out chug, she's shopping for 'a personality / A whole backstory' via luxury goods. There's no moralising side-eye: Charli understands that self-commodification is just the way we live now, how it might offer an escape from dire times, or helpfully beckon the hellfires faster. Alongside co-producers AG Cook and Easyfun, Charli remakes guitar music at intimate, pocket-sized scale with outsized hookiness.
There are two telling songs about different best-friendships. Magic Metal Montana is a love song to long-term producer AG Cook: 'We don't talk,' she sings tenderly, 'we make music, we talk that way.' The bolshie, muscular Persona teases a friend who talks endlessly and calls Charli her bestie but never says anything real, a performance Charli understands: 'We're both under the influence of life imitating art, and we both know it.'
Confronting Anxieties Through Art
For Charli, ever fearless about looking unflattering, it's her audience. Two shockingly brilliant standouts address her self-actualisation through art. The melancholy, jittering Camera confronts her anxieties about whether she's stupid for wanting to 'throw my life away' to pursue acting, but the way it softens into a heavenly, firefly-dappled rhapsody makes you understand exactly how liberating it is. Pop star-actors are always labelled dilettantes. Charli reframes the idea: how at any moment, a bolt from the blue might undo your idea of yourself, make you feel terrifyingly reborn.
Her actual birth features on I'm Afraid, about how her insecurities may stem from her father not being present at hers. Over spare, bassy dissonance that echoes her fantastically dank John Cale collaboration House, she screams about her fears of failing as a wife (she married 1975 drummer George Daniel last summer) when she's just a drunk, numb, desperate kid. 'Take the ring, take the ring,' she yells; then she sounds exhausted as she admits she has to say these 'complicated' things 'so my insides don't turn black'. She admits: 'All this pain makes me believe / I'm a better artist now / An excuse I tell myself / To act selfishly.' Her unsparing compulsion to lay it all out for us makes Charli our most consistently bracing pop star.
