For more than a decade, Charli XCX was a secret weapon, a brazen experimentalist, a raw diarist, and (apologies to Chappell Roan) your favorite artist’s favorite artist. But she was not, exactly, a pop star — the kind that fills arenas,covers magazines,performs at the Grammys, and has the masses hanging on her every word. The British musician’s culture-shifting 2024 electro-pop confessionalBrat changed all that, lifting her name from “also starring” to above the title. Who better to churn out a 30-minute treatise on the art of image-making?
Charli is well on her way to mastering all three mediums spelled out in the title of her new LP, Music, Fashion, Film. But the story of her seventh studio album has been its seeming swerve, as announced by its first single, “Rock Music.” The track — with its croaking guitar, cymbal smashes, and stuttering vocals — sounds nothing like Brat’s gleaming, clubby gems (or the bouncy pop-punk of her 2014 LP Sucker, for that matter). But it doesn’t define an aesthetic as much as an ethos: hanging around and making stuff with your friends. As another hitmaking iconoclast once said, it’s still rock & roll to me.
Over 10 succinct songs (and a comparatively sprawling closer), Charli and her writing and producing partners A.G. Cook and Finn Keane dissect the stardom she hates to love and loves to hate. The breezy “SS26” toys with the idea of having a bad-girl image when everything in the world is bad. “Card Declined” starts as a comically simple clanger about being defined by one’s possessions, then blooms into a brief reverie before closing with a minute of perky, love-struck indie pop. “I keep thinking ’bout you, every single day,” Charli sings, ostensibly to the handbag of her dreams.
There’s room for human affection on the album, too. “I’m Afraid,” which bristles like an outtake from Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged, plunks a guitar’s low notes as Charli reveals her anxieties about marrying the 1975’s drummer, George Daniel. On “Magic Metal Montana,” she gushes about her other great relationship — with her longtime collaborator, Cook — in a giddy run-on that praises his haircut, his dancing, and his ability to read her musical mind.
But the majority of the album is focused on the machinery that brings stars to life, with nods to the Velvet Underground, a band that was famously nurtured by a man who knew a little something about that. “Camera” glimpses the future Charli could build in the movie industry, turning a few quick-strummed notes into an ode to the thrill of a new ambition. The following track, “2007,” gazes back to the very beginning, when she was first in “heaven,” creating her own image in her bedroom and blasting it into the world with no outside intervention. Seduced by that beautiful simplicity, Charli’s digitally clipped voice cuts through the noise: “You’re the way I wanna feel/Wanna feel it really bad.”
The album’s standout is “Wink Wink,” the song most clearly bobbing on the line between authenticity and artifice. Playing with the way her public persona has been boiled down to tropes — as well as her own well-established tendency to troll — Charli’s hilarious speak-sung verses explode into a super-catchy chorus consisting almost entirely of a single note. Adding harmonies, she builds herself a double as she engages in some doublespeak: “Here’s the truth, and I gotta be honest/I’m not a bad girl anymore, I promise.” For those who missed the point, she adds the obvious: “Wink wink wink wink.”
Charli tackles a similar topic in a starkly different way on the closer, “No One Lasts Forever.” She sings again about being perceived as an impolite party girl, only this time there is no snarky twist, just a vow to live in the moment without fear. As the music turns spacey, she hands over the mic to director David Cronenberg, who’s known for delighting in the grotesque. For a few moments, he speaks about how art may be immortal, but the artists who created it are not.
Charli and her team loop his voice intoning “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever” 27 full times (anotorious number in rock history) before it cuts out, his voice twisting into a mesmerizing yet slightly disturbing coil. Where does that leave the ever-evolving Charli XCX? Like a maestro whose true medium is the moment, she’s given us nothing to do but wait and find out.
Steve Cohen*
Paul Heartfield*
