The second summer of Charli XCX

By now, most people tuned into the work of Charli XCX will have grasped that Music, Fashion, Film – her highly anticipated latest album – performs a handbrake turn away from her previous LP, Brat, the omnipresent club-pop phenomenon of 2024. Everything turned lurid green for a while. Now Music, Fashion, Film’s visuals go heavy on black and white, and guitar distortion fills the air. Rock Music, the record’s first teaser track, found her pouting: “I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making rock music.”

Those final two words are elongated and laden with effects (“rooooccccck musiiiiic”); a little wink that this is very much a genre iteration by sonic mischief-makers who have no intention of turning their backs on digital manipulation entirely. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Charli XCX conceded that the dancefloor is alive and well, citing electronic artists Slayyyter and Underscores, and her husband George Daniel’s dance label dh2, while also stating that Music, Fashion, Film isn’t really a rock record and that she never claimed it was. “I’ve never thought about genre in a binary way,” she said. “I find that to be a very old-school notion.”

Her latest album, then, is one that embraces the immediacy and rattle of a guitar band, but runs those attributes through a Charli XCX filter; one in which her producers – hyperpop don AG Cook and Finn Keane (formerly known as Easyfun) – have a gleeful hand. Pop and electronic musicians often misunderstand rock, parachuting in a gurning, soft metal guitar solo to stand in for attitude. Thankfully, this lot are better than that.

Often grungy and stripped back, yet just as often oversaturated, Music, Fashion, Film has moments, such as on Yeah, where it feels as if the singer is a hair’s breadth from breaking into Song 2 by Blur – in a good way. Even more startling is Card Declined, which channels the deadpan sprechgesang and post-punk of left-field darlings Dry Cleaning. Charli XCX and co make guitars sound acrylic, turn basslines into reverberations and deploy their considerable hyperpop nous to the quiet/loud dynamics of rock with the enthusiasm of kids in a sweetshop, which is what the trio aims to be: creatives having the best time and sounding like it.

Charli XCX – born Charlotte Aitchison and raised on the Hertfordshire-Essex border – has been working on a lot of movies recently, including – but not limited to – the soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, her own Brat mockumentary, The Moment, in which she starred, plus roles in 100 Nights of Hero and Faces of Death. The track Camera, a song about acting, makes the singer question her career direction: “Do I wanna make music?”

That question stalks Music, Fashion, Film. The outstanding banger Wink Wink is an earworm about how the singer may be evolving from a party girl, strutting around pulling sexy faces on social media, into something else. The video was shot in a field near her childhood home; a plane from Stansted flies overhead.

Charli XCX is heavily into the Velvet Underground; her rescue dog is called Nico and she recently worked with former band member John Cale on House. The black-and-white cover of Music, Fashion, Film personifies the title’s three art forms as male muses: Cale, designer Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese. But it’s horror director David Cronenberg who guests on closing tracking No One Lasts Forever, about the importance – or, perhaps, lack thereof – of artistic immortality.

Although the zeitgeist-seizing bop SS26 makes the point that none of these things – not music, not fashion, not film – will save us from “a runway that goes straight to hell”, the overriding theme on the album is creativity. You can hear this as a record full of love songs to her musical inspirations and to artistry, with odes to her friends and collaborators also figuring: the pacy standout Magic Metal Montana, which features a fabulously smeary vocal melody, is dedicated to producer Cook, while Persona is a passive-aggressive paean to an unnamed friend, or, perhaps, Charli XCX herself.

Brat’s secret weapon was its candour, mainly about the anxious woman behind the pop star persona. Here, on I’m Afraid, the singer is found spiralling into all kinds of insecurity, but this time the treatment – singsong melody, low-slung instruments – is grunge by numbers, like a Hole track devised by AI, lacking in clever production topspin.

Glitches aside, the story of Music, Fashion, Film unfolds a little like the singer’s pandemic album, How I’m Feeling Now: a tightly themed work made in a compressed production time. And although it sounds very little like Brat, it somehow still is brat. Only two tracks exceed the three-minute mark, and mostly it is a brash and playful outing. This is an artist who regards laurels like poison ivy and, because of that, should keep receiving them.

Photographs by Tyrell Hampton, Huxley World