Music, fashion, film, mess

Charli XCX was “the future of pop music” for nearly a decade and a half before the culture caught up with her. From the moment she linked up with members of the proto-hyperpop collective PC Music in the mid-2010s, critics and niche pop audiences alike saw her potential. Yet she remained a B-lister prone to corporate meddling, so much a textbook “Khia” that her old label was literally named Asylum. Truly, you wouldn’t last an hour in the Asylum where they mandated Lizzo collabs.

In 2024, Charli finally broke through with BRAT, a cultural phenomenon that took on a life of its own, with political implications. The true secret is that for all the posturing and pixelated covers, BRAT wasn’t actually that uncommercial: she’s always had chant-along choruses whether she worked with SOPHIE, sang an Iggy Azalea hook or wrote a Selena Gomez song, and you couldn’t go anywhere in 2024 without people proclaiming the amount of Julia they were. No “anti-marketing” necessary: it was just good marketing for a good pop album.

Since BRAT, she’s embarked on endless side quests. Her surprisingly gorgeous and majestic Wuthering Heights soundtrack is a blank-cheque chamber-pop triumph for an Emerald Fennell movie that probably didn’t deserve it; her 2026 mockumentary The Moment is a Last Jedi-style deconstruction of the BRAT era, leaving behind its perceived coolness to explore the complicated friendships and industry baggage that powered the original record’s conflict (in lieu of any actual Charli songs, there’s a sincere ’90s Britpop needle drop for the ages). 

With BRAT’s proper follow-up, Music, Fashion, Film, she goes as far in the other direction as possible, but BRAT’s lime-green shadow still looms over it. If 2022’s CRASH was Charli trying to reach the A-list, and BRAT was about how she’s too neurotic to reach the A-list, Music, Fashion, Film is about being too neurotic to survive the A-list. 

This album feels like going through someone’s Close Friends story as they’re crashing out while ’00s indie landfill plays through a skipping CD boombox. The drums are deadened, if they’re real at all; the vocals have almost no processing beyond auto-tune. These are all intentional aesthetic choices, and they can be striking at best. But mostly it’s too boxed in, and when the songs work, it’s in spite of Charli’s insistence on dryness.

The two near-spoken-word tracks on BRAT, “I Think About It All The Time” and “I Might Say Something Stupid,” are nobody’s favourite, but their disarming honesty grounds the album’s club antics, and they’re the blueprint for what she does here. Those were compelling interludes, but centring a whole album around that leaves the album feeling aimless. Everyone knows fame is a gun and it’s a knife when you’re finally on top —these are not new topics, but what’s new, for better or worse, is the specificity. On “Rock Music,” she can’t even kiss her friends without thinking “real incestuous vibes” and going “I knew you’d like that” to an imaginary audience. (A woman with a stan inside watching a woman?) “SS26” reads apocalyptic in the vein of Lana Del Rey’s 2019 opus “The greatest” but Charli insists it’s her post-BRAT inner monologue about trying on different personas as she struggles to figure out her next move: “Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell/ Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film.”

 On “Wink Wink,” she describes going from “[jumping] on trampolines with no underwear on” to “[wearing] trousers,” consciously taming herself as a reaction to the party-girl persona. The reassuring wink after the line “I’m not a bad girl anymore” just feels tired. Through these songs, we never truly get novel insight into Charli; at the risk of facing the wrath of both Angels and Swifties, it feels a lot like The Tortured Poets Department, the moment when an artist disappears completely into their own meta-narrative.

The genuinely funny B-side “I Keep on Thinking Bout You Every Single Day and Night,” briefly teased at the end of “Card Declined” but not on the album proper, is the one time the endless venting works. Charli becomes so fascinated with a woman that she wants to merge identities, but backs away from considering she’s gay by quipping “look at me, I’m probably not.” It recontextualizes the other time she’s played a homoerotic straight girl—we don’t talk about “Girls”—and it merely sits with the feeling instead of trying to intellectualize it. Unfortunately, because “Night” is a part of this era, the humour is buried under a sludgy mix of impenetrable synths and crudely distorted guitars.

The worst part is, when Charli and producers A.G. Cook and Finn Keane break from their self-imposed restrictions, the album finally achieves liftoff. “Persona” is as dreamy and slippery as the Ingmar Bergman movie it references; it’s clear there’s this idealized other figure she wants to merge with, but unusually for this album, the Other is abstract. Is it another woman, like the Bergman movie? Is it her past BRAT persona? It doesn’t give all the answers. Best of all, it has a monster chorus worthy of any great record she’s made, while still keeping the sparseness of the album’s aesthetics. On the other standout, “Camera,” the trio layer these scratchy guitar loops together, building to the closest thing to euphoria there is on this album. When she says “all I know is how it makes me feel,” it’s a relief she can still feel anything at all.

For the first time since the largely Ariel Rechshaid-produced Tumblr pop of True Romance, Charli feels derivative of herself. “All my music sounds the same/ Well, that’s because I made it,” she says on B-side “Playboy Bunny.” But even BRAT had a piano interlude, even CRASH made room for New Jack Swing snares alongside the obligatory old pop song interpolations; “Vroom Vroom” didn’t stay the same within its own run-time. “2007” is just another nostalgic song in the vein of “Rewind” and “1999,” though its accompaniment on the visual album is the one earnest celebration of how far Charli came. “Wink Wink” takes her all the way back to the new-wave inspired Sucker songs like “London Queen” and “Body of My Own,” but those songs had melodies: “Wink Wink” is literally one-note. Does anyone want hypopop?

“My penchant for ‘coolness’ probably points to my deep-rooted insecurity (or perhaps I’d even go as far as calling it a fear) of being boring,” Charli wrote on her Substack. That’s part of why she’s always had this contrarian streak to her music. But on Music, Fashion, Film, her contrarianism accidentally takes the record’s framing into uncomfortable territory. BRAT captured all the messy contradictions of being a cool, aloof party girl—like, for example, musing about going off birth control while shouting out Dasha Nekrasova, a supporter of someone who wants to take it away. All the while, she paid tribute to the trans woman who changed her life, and sweetly made amends with her hair doppelganger Lorde on the “Girl, So Confusing” remix. But that was 2024. 

Post-Trump, as so much of the world cracks down on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, there’s this universal retreat I’ve noticed into survival mode, a regression where women specifically take up less and less space—those once-innocuous “girl dinner”/”girl math” memes that started in 2023 didn’t help. I’m not the only one pointing it out; regression feels safer when rights are under attack. To quote a film Charli ironically soundtracked: “It’s like a spa day for my brain. Forever!” 

It’s only gotten more confusing to be a girl, particularly one “on the screen when she’s turning 34,” as she sings on “Camera.” Being a girl got so confusing she cast Vincent Cassel, legendary actor and Andrew Tate apologist, in that song’s role-reversal video. Being a girl got so confusing she put three (beloved, highly influential) men on the MFF cover, using their cultural cachet as a flex. Charli made fun of girlboss culture in The Moment, as Alexander Skarsgård’s tyrannical director turns her creative director’s gritty show into an extravaganza with #Bitch signs and Xylobands. But is this pure nihilistic dread any better? This album, lyrically and sonically, is frustratingly rigid and limited for someone who paved the way for pop to be anything. It’s the sound of giving up.

Closer “No One Lasts Forever” breaks the album open, featuring the legendary David Cronenberg. With his mix of countercultural weirdness like Videodrome and Crash and genuine crossover hits like The Fly and Scanners, he feels as much like a blueprint for Charli as anyone on the actual cover. 

On the track, Cronenberg talks about a near-death experience. Charli asks if he was thinking about his legacy, and crucially, Cronenberg responds: “I didn’t think about art at all, I thought about people.” It’s the exact opposite of everything Charli’s done on the last two albums (possibly three, if you buy CRASH’s ironic framing). It makes her musings on the rest of the album feel even more myopic and pointless.

Beneath it all, Charli is ultimately earnest, and her tenderness is more interesting than her “indie sleaze” posturing. “Magic Metal Montana” is a tribute to A.G. Cook, saying for him what she couldn’t say to SOPHIE: “I’d be nothing without you/ I think you taught me, I think I taught you.” It’s a tribute to someone who’s made a career in service of her work, and there’s no bitterness. It’s a rare heartwarming moment on any mainline Charli album.

Unusually, part of the problem is that there were too few people behind the boards, just a trio answering to nobody. The Swedish melodic math of songwriters like Noonie Bao (the Vroom Vroom EP, BRAT) and Lotus IV (Charli, CRASH) are missed on a record that sounds so empty. So many moments are almost good, but god forbid Charli actually reach the catharsis of songs like “Track 10” or “Next Level Charli.” MFF is compelling on paper, but infinitely more fun to talk about than to actually hear. 

I actively hope this album doesn’t have the impact BRAT or Vroom Vroom did. I would hate to see the colourful world of electronica and hyperpop flattened into dead-eyed monochrome, trying to capture the sound of someone who left the dance floor behind.