“Music, Fashion, Film,” the proudly prickly, satisfyingly scuzzy eighth album by Charli XCX, is but one component in what now feels like a long and occasionally fatiguing pop performance piece about how one follows an unexpected cultural juggernaut that launched its creator to a new level of fame.
That was 2024’s “Brat,” a brash, go-for-broke LP that boomeranged between hedonistic party-girl self-mythologizing (“I wanna dance to me, when I go to the club”) and disarmingly vulnerable confessions of insecurity that reimagined the pop lyric akin to a messy run-on sentence texted to a trusted group chat in the middle of the night. “I’m embarrassed to have it but need the sympathy,” she sang on a self-loathing synth-pop anthem about failing to measure up to an A-list pop star. In a twist, “Brat” made her one. But it also ballooned into a phenomenon much larger than music — the endless memes of “Brat Summer,” with its accompanying slime-green aesthetic and goblin-mode attitude — that risked turning Charli into a caricature or, perhaps worse, a conventional celebrity.
Before “Brat,” Charli XCX, the Brit born Charlotte Aitchison, was as close to the underground as one can get while still qualifying as a pop star. She had flashes of mainstream success a decade prior — as a songwriter and featured vocalist on Icona Pop’s 2012 sugar rush “I Love It” and Iggy Azalea’s 2014 playground taunt “Fancy,” before scoring a top 10 solo hit with the dreamy “Boom Clap” — but quickly swerved into a more experimental lane, making edgy and forward-thinking electro-pop that resonated with a niche audience.
In the two years since “Brat,” she starred as a funhouse-mirror version of herself in the interesting but rather one-note mockumentary “The Moment,” and, more successfully, released a swooning soundtrack album that accompanied Emerald Fennell’s period piece “Wuthering Heights.” It proved Charli’s range extended far beyond postmillennial party-girl anthems, but the pressure of a proper “Brat” follow-up album still loomed.
So what, on “Music, Fashion, Film,” does Charli do in the blank-check aftermath of her life-changing album? Use her newly minted mass-cultural capital to make crowd-pleasing No. 1 hits that will level her up from arena tours to stadiums? No, this brief, barbed and unrepentantly personal new album asserts — she’d rather use it to make an uncompromising work that places her in conversation with some of her heroes, like the holy trinity of white male elders she assembled for the album’s striking, bonkers cover: the art-rock lifer John Cale, the onetime “guru of grunge” designer Marc Jacobs and the human embodiment of absolute cinema Martin Scorsese. The spiky French actor Vincent Cassel also stars in the music video for Charli’s latest single “Camera,” and her perennial favorite Lou Reed, Cale’s former bandmate in the Velvet Underground, remains a touchstone.
It’s fair to wonder why the pantheon of artists Charli has so self-consciously chosen to align herself with for this album are all old white men. But, ever a student of fame and its perception, she also seems to be aware that there is a certain transgression inherent in someone like her — a 33-year-old, mixed-race woman who cares about fashion and is best known for making supposedly lowbrow pop music — daring to claim the influence of, and perhaps even friendships with, these serious artistes, whose provocations, unlike hers, come with the built-in gravitas afforded by maleness, whiteness and age.
Compared, as it will inevitably be, to the bounty of “Brat” and the inventive, collaborative remix album that followed it, there’s no denying that the 11-song, 30-minute “Music, Fashion, Film” is a minor work. Some of its songs, like the brooding and anxious newlywed confessional “I’m Afraid” or the bouncy ear worm “2007,” feel like tossed-off rough drafts that might have yielded something richer had they been further developed. But that wouldn’t be in the spirit of “Music, Fashion, Film,” which consciously presents itself as an album that embraces, even glorifies, the slapdash.
“Brat” made Charli famous enough that the stakes of her celebrity are no longer riding on whether or not a single album of hers becomes a career-defining success, and here she seems to find that notion freeing. If you can get over the fact that it’s not “Brat 2.0” — and plenty of her newer fans won’t — this new album’s quick-and-dirty, first-thought-best-thought ethos has plenty of its own visceral appeal.
Take the mindless, bare-bones charm of “Yeah,” a sassy refusenik rocker on which Charli, in her classic deadpan, repeats over and over how much she doesn’t want to feel anything — before cuing a cathartic, blown-out chorus when she suddenly admits that now she does want to feel. (Charli can inject wry humor into even the tersest lines; consider all she can do with a simple “wow” in the pixelated garage band opener “Rock Music.”) Another highlight, the swaggering pop-punk banger “Persona,” is one of those self-lacerating diss songs that Charli perfected on “Brat,” although this time the atmosphere is augmented by the steely din of buzz saw guitars.
Despite its lead single’s humorously demonstrative lyrics (“I think the dance floor is dead so now we’re making rock music”), this is not exactly a traditional rock album. Guitars hiccup, glitch or slowly bleed blooms of pooling distortion, serving merely as jumping-off points for the buoyant digital imaginations of Charli’s longtime collaborators, the producers A.G. Cook (their friendship is the subject of the sweetest song on the album, “Magic Metal Montana”) and Finn Keane. Here, they revel in grungy textures and states of decay as much as they usually do in highly reflective pop gloss.
If we must assign a genre, let’s call it Letterboxd-core, after the cinephile social media site of which Charli is a power user. Since “Brat,” Charli has also begun a prolific acting career, appearing in such interesting, under-the-radar fare as the travelogue indie “Erupcja” and the horror remake “Faces of Death.” (She’s also shooting an upcoming slasher with the Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike and an art-world satire directed by Cathy Yan, among other projects.)
On one of the album’s highlights, the wrenching and remarkably candid “Camera,” Charli openly admits that she enjoys acting so much that she has fantasized about making a “French exit” from her pop career. “It makes me want to throw my life away,” Charli sings with palpable angst, of her newfound love of acting, atop guitar chords that flicker like yawning shutters. She’s not even sure she’s a particularly good actress yet — “I don’t feel embarrassed even if I suck” — but that uncertainty gives her a thrill that music cannot always provide.
In October 2024, Charli released a star-studded remix album that served as a companion piece to “Brat” and implicitly proved how many A-list pop stars (Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Lorde) were now willing to answer her call to hop on a track. On this new album, though, she opts for only one featured artist … and it’s the 83-year-old body horror film auteur David Cronenberg. (News that, perhaps in homage to his 1981 cult classic “Scanners,” certainly made some heads explode.) Charli’s die-hards — called Angels, naturally — know that she has subtly referenced Cronenberg before, in the title and sex-meets-vehicular-violence cover image of her 2022 album “Crash.” But here Cronenberg’s surprisingly serene voice is the focal point, as he recounts, in an extended and genuinely moving spoken-word outro, the wisdom he gleaned from a near-death experience.
Lying on the pavement, wondering if he was dying, Cronenberg says, he thought not about the art he’d made or his legacy, but the people in his life. He realized that even the rarefied artists whose work has endured centuries aren’t immortal: “They are dead, they are gone. No one lasts for ever.”
Is ending an album this way a cop-out — a way of saying none of it matters? Charli, on the contrary, seems to find this reminder of transience artistically freeing, especially in the wake of her prior success. But even from the edge of existential oblivion, she and her co-conspirators can’t help but looking for the pop hook, and so they end the album by chopping up and looping Cronenberg’s voice into a rhythmic sample: “They are dead, they are gone — no one lasts forever.” Ashes to ashes, brat to brat.
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