Music, Fashion, Film is Antagonistic and Brilliant

Design by Sophie Parrish

By Bennett Himmel

It’s hard to imagine how much of a niche, cult-favorite artist Charli XCX once was. With 2024’s summer-dominating opus Brat, XCX was catapulted out of pop’s middle class into A-list stardom, armed with massive collabs, acid green paint, and even more massive synth lines. Charli went from barely selling out theaters to selling out arenas, from collabs with “fag mob leader” Brooke Candy to collabs with Ariana Grande, and, of course, from being the “Boom Clap girl” to the “Brat girl.” 

Brat Summer, for all the good it did to Charli’s at times floundering career, possibly pigeonholed her more than ever before. This is because Brat Summer was about so much more than an album: it was about cigarettes, about nipples showing through white tank tops, about Kamala Harris! Charli was touted as the chain-smoking voice of a messy generation, one who sang honestly and openly about feeling unconfident while looking hot and coked out. There’s no denying that the album, and to some extent, the summer was magical. But it left listeners and new, younger fans wondering: Where do you go from here?

After a middling if at times interesting soundtrack for Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights, Charli is here with the answer: her eighth studio album Music, Fashion, Film. She has traded out Razor synth for blown out guitars, confidence for existential turmoil, and neon green for black, white, and baby blue. It comes as a curious entry in her discography, an act of semi-deliberate, earnest trolling, and one that feels exclusively for the original Charli heads. 

When Charli released the lead single and opening track of the record, “Rock Music,” it was met with backlash almost entirely due to its chorus: “I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making RAWWWWWWWWWWKKKKKKKKKK music!” Obviously, the dancefloor is not dead, Charli has said as much, but this upset many people who saw her as a figurehead of club culture. “Rock Music” is a fascinating song; still, I feel like people miss the obvious jokes in this song, the way she sighs that she’s “so inspired,” the audible eye roll when she follows up the chorus with “It’s so dead.”. At 1:55, it’s Charli’s shortest song to date, and it lacks the immediacy of 2024’s “Von Dutch,” but it’s a fascinating commentary on the image of Charli XCX and how it feels to make stuff with your friends.

Much of the discourse around this record is about how Charli seems preoccupied with her own coolness. There is the fact that her Letterboxd is full of French art films, that she’s basically a walking Capri Ultra Light, or that on “Wink Wink” she says that she pretty much only shops at French fashion outlet A.P.C. On “Rock Music”’s non-album B-side, “I Keep On Thinking Bout You Every Single Day And Night,” Charli waxes poetic about a female acquaintance, about how maybe they could become each other, “Like somethin’ out of a Jacques Rivette movie or somethin’.” Even as a hardcore fan, it’s hard to ignore how self-conscious Charli comes off on this record. She clearly feels a bit of pressure coming off of Brat and some of her lyrics clunkily attempt to recall the tossed-off eloquence of songs like “I might say something stupid.”

This is not to say that Music, Fashion, Film isn’t fantastic. “Persona,” about an unnamed friend, is in some ways an even more confusing examination of female friendship than she’s ever done before. She calls this friend narcissistic and all ego, accusing them of calling her their best friend to keep her at arm’s length, but acknowledges that she’s capable of doing the same. In a short clip of documentary footage, Charli sighs, “I guess I have narcissistic friends, but I love them, and this song is about me too.” When she sings “I gotta say, I do respect the commitment to the bit/ Now, that’s persona,” it’s hard to tell if she’s singing to the friend or herself. But there’s also touching songs about friendship on this album, like the excellent A.G. Cook sonnet “Magic Metal Montana,” a stream of consciousness burst of energy that at moments recalls “Take On Me.”

Music, Fashion, Film’s highlights immediately register as a much-needed change of pace for Charli. “Yeah” and “2007” feel like some of the most genuinely experimental things she’s done in a long time, taking her knack for repetition and dialing it up to 100, creating face-melting earworms out of things that look incredibly stupid when written on paper. “I’m Afraid” is a fascinating inquiry into what happens when the pop star closes the door and turns out the light, what it’s like to be alone while still in a relationship. It’s staggeringly open and vulnerable, especially for an album that’s so keen on flip-flopping between earnestness and trolling.

Speaking of earnestness and trolling, there’s the single “Wink Wink,” which boasts one of the album’s catchiest choruses and verses most likely to piss people off. Devoid of rhythm or rhyme, XCX simply throws out phrases about her whole thing, about how she, like everyone, is capable of change. It’s a banger, but it is possibly the most slyly antagonistic song she’s ever written; she’s begging you to hate it, but she knows the chorus is so good that you simply can’t.

The thesis of the album arrives in the closer, “No One Lasts Forever,” which features a lengthy spoken word section from director David Cronenberg. It’s at times lyrically simplistic—“But you need to discover that feeling/ Of the crushing highs and lows of ego”—yet is the most effective at distilling Charli’s thoughts on fame post-Brat. She admits that since everyone learned her name, “all the parties got better,” but it came at the cost of everyone thinking she’s a junkie. She reckons with whether this album will be a success, whether she will last in the public eye, and the answer feels pretty bleak. The album ends with Cronenberg stating that “oblivion is freedom,” and the phrase “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever” looped 27 times, a cursed number in the music world. It leaves the listener with an unshakeable sense of dread, and it makes for a thrilling, sprawling closer after a pretty damn short album.

I’m not going to lie to you and say that this album is one of Charli’s best. I’m an admitted Charli acolyte; there’s not really a single album of hers that I dislike. However, this album certainly isn’t for fans who haven’t totally bought into her myth. Music, Fashion, Film, is many things. It’s her funniest album. It’s sneakily catchy and some of the more simplistic lyrics can come off quite wise. The shift to guitars and rock music is done in a fascinating way; this is certainly not your typical 2020’s pop-punk revivalism. Charli’s dabbled in rock on her sophomore album, the sometimes delightful, sometimes downright interminable Sucker, and it’s done much more gracefully and fittingly here.  But there’s also the fact that it begs the listener not to like it. Charli has a habit in interviews lately where she basically says that the album is ironic, but it isn’t, but it is, but it’s not.  Don’t get me wrong, the album is certainly well-made and enjoyable, but is impossible to divorce from her larger-than-life persona. So much of the album, as with Brat, feels buried in the marketing, and as a longtime fan, after two extremely emotional, vulnerable, image-focused records, it’s hard not to want songs about going fast in cars again. But Music, Fashion, Film is here, and it’s a true conversation starter. The most polarizing things can sometimes last forever.