Brat Summer‘s diet consisted of cigarettes, but this summer Charli XCX is indulging in strawberries and cream for her new single “Wink Wink.” The singer described the song as the “final piece in the Music, Fashion, Film rollout,” according to a video posted to her @b.sides Instagram.
The song’s accompanying Aidan Zamiri-directed video opens with Charli laying in a field snacking on berries underneath a cloudy sky. Soon, we see Charli sitting on top on her roof at home and writing in her diary as she insists that she’s changed, reasoning in the open verse: “I used to jump on trampolines with no underwear on/And now I basically just wear trousers.” As she goes about washing windows, doing laundry, and cleaning the dishes, each chore gets progressively more provocative as she sings the chorus, “Here’s the truth, and I gotta be honest/I’m not a bad girl anymore, I promise.”
“Wink Wink” follows previous tracks “Rock Music” and “SS26.” The last two singles were quickly supplemented with the respective B sides “I Keep on Thinking Bout You Every Single Day and Night” and “Playboy Bunny,” which are only available to hear on Instagram or via a limited edition 7-inch vinyl. Only time will tell what will complement the release of “Wink Wink.”
Charli recently revealed her seventh record would feature one collaboration, but declined to divulge who the artist is on the French talk show Quotidien. “I’d bet money on you not guessing. You can try!” she told Yann Barthès. “You could have 1,000 chances and you still wouldn’t guess [who it is].”
Music, Fashion, Film, XCX’s follow-up to Brat, is out on July 24. The album cover was shot by Charli’s close confidant Aidan Zamiri and features a black-and-white image of John Cale, Martin Scorsese, and Marc Jacobs. Cale had never met Jacobs or Scorsese before the shoot. “It was a type of surreal cultural compendium assembled to document yet another form of art. I wanted to be a fly on the wall watching this unfold, but I had to be in it,” he told Rolling Stone.
Charli will make her debut festival performance of the album at Lollapalooza on July 31, and then Charli will hit stages across the United States and United Kingdom on her Music, Fashion, Film tour later this fall.
“I don’t really feel the need to explain my intentions behind anything I do,” Charli told Rolling Stone in her July/August cover story. “I find that things can be earnest and funny at the same time, and they don’t have to exclusively live separately. That’s how I feel about a lot of my work, and if people interpret that as trolling, then that’s fine.”
“It’s funny the way that success can cage you, but I’ve experienced such a wide range of success and failure,” she continued. “For the people who knew me before Brat, they know the ebbs and flows of my process, and I understand the ebbs and flows of pop music and pop culture. So I feel relatively free in creating whatever I’ll do next.”
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