Charli xcx: Music, Fashion, Film review – slippery search into selfhood that hits just as hard as Brat
(Atlantic)
How do you follow up the album that made you a star – and a caricature? In classic Charli style: with a pivot to guitar and a meta masterpiece about the instability of identity
After a decade spent trailblazing a unique kind of pop freedom from the genre’s fringes, A-list success seemed like the thing that might finally trap Charli xcx. Her 2024 club-rat opus Brat spawned memes, embarrassing political bandwagoning, Collins’ word of the year and possibly 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 – whether Charli could sustain the interest – was so rife she turned it into a mockumentary, The Moment. It made success look miserable: your creation turned cringe by execs wanting to milk their prize cow dry of every last acid-green drop.
Even for a pop star renowned for reinvention, it put a higher price on her next move. Pivot and risk losing new fans and looking wilfully contrarian. When Charli released the sub-two-minute single Rock Music, many heard it as a middle finger. “I think the dancefloor is dead,” she drawls over guitars that buzzed like speakers weathering interference from a Nokia 5110, “so now we’re making rock music.” There were boring thinkpieces about the dancefloor being very much alive, actually (as if Charli had ever ridden culture for clout then binned it off), and about whether she was trying to eject fair-weather new fans. But 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, and to come with Charli – or not, as you like – as she takes this one.
Music, Fashion, Film’s prosaic title references Charli’s recent turn towards acting and fashion collaborations. But from the first singles, the bigger picture felt a little murky compared with Brat’s excavation of anxieties around female relationships. She quickly protested that she wasn’t reeeeaally 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. But I’d bet these releases were intentionally diffuse, preventing Music, Fashion, Film from slipping out of Charli’s control before it was even out.
That slipperiness turns out to be the essence of another gorgeously astute and disarmingly deep album about the instability of identity – not just as a vanguard songwriter striving for evolution, but how much we can ever know one another, or even ourselves. 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, always a laser-focused cultural observer, 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. Even leaning on guitars and stripping away Charli’s usual AutoTune toys with the idea of authenticity, though it’s far from genre cosplay. Alongside co-producers AG Cook and Easyfun, Charli remakes guitar music at intimate, pocket-sized scale – though with outsized hookiness.
There are two telling songs about different best-friendships. Magic Metal Montana, a dreamy blur of Strokes guitars and emo half-time, 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,” she chants. Who do you trust with your true, faltering self?
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.
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Brat pack: Charli xcx’s 20 best songs – ranked!
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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, two more ill-fitting identities. “Take the ring, take the ring,” she yells; then she sounds exhausted as she admits she has to say these “complicated”, unsayable things “so my insides don’t turn black”. That’s less of a case for artistic purification than it might seem: “All this pain makes me believe / I’m a better artist now / An excuse I tell myself / To act selfishly,” she admits. Does she contradict herself? Absolutely. Does that unsparing compulsion to lay it all out for us – the ego and self-hate; the defensiveness and chagrin – make Charli our most consistently bracing pop star? God, yes.
This week Laura listened to
Heavensouls – StraightRawhhhhhhhhh
This week and every week since I discovered it: the 20-year-old Houston musician’s album Westside Trapped is a blurry, blown-out love letter to his Nigerian heritage. Among the frisky Fela-worthy moments comes this fantastically bitter, gnarled blues.
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