The cover of Charli XCX’s new album, Music, Fashion, Film, features a stark black-and-white photograph of the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, fashion designer Marc Jacobs and director Martin Scorsese. Geddit? Charli is a modern star with deeper interests and intelligent tastes; she wants to make art, not vacuous pop music!
It’s an honourable mission – except Music, Fashion, Film is vacuous in the extreme. On more than half of its 11 songs, ugly, distorted synths drown out any semblance of emotional clarity; the lyrics deal in cringeworthy, surface-level platitudes; and the brilliance of her last studio album, 2024’s Brat, continues to cast a long shadow over an artist who was thrust into the big leagues against her will.
In a Vogue interview earlier this year, Charli (real name Charlotte Emma Aitchison) declared that the “dancefloor is dead” and rock music was her new focus – but you wouldn’t know it from this record, which seems to treat “rock” as nothing more than noise, noise, noise.
The 33-year-old is in thrall to her identity as the “coolest star in pop”. Brat, with its zeitgeisty slime-green branding and hit singles that idolise messy behaviour, marked the biggest pop culture moment of 2024. It transformed Charli from a relatively fringe pop star into a major commercial player. She vapes. She sings about cocaine. She’s married to a member of indie band the 1975. Charli is the anti-Taylor Swift; she’s the pop star people want to party with.
As always, she is at her best, and most singular, when commenting on the pressures of global fame: how celebrity strips people of their identity and purpose. The highlights are Camera, where she movingly continues the themes of Brat’s Sympathy is a Knife and Girl, So Confusing, about living her life under social media’s unrelenting, critical (and often misogynistic) glare: “I don’t feel embarrassed even if I suck / I’m always craving an experience that feels dangerous.”
Meanwhile, on Persona, Charli XCX, the festival headliner and “It girl”, is in a constant battle with the real Charlotte’s internal dialogue: “Every day you’re suffering / But you say you’re doing fine.” The latter is the album’s strongest track, both lyrically and in its production, as AG Cook’s abrasive, thrashing sounds grate against the soul-baring lyrics. It’s stunning.
But then you have Music, Fashion, Film’s bad side. Card Declined sounds like Rid of Me-era PJ Harvey constructed by ChatGPT; I’m Afraid is Alphaville’s Forever Young combined with the dreary howls of the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, but somehow worse. On Magic Metal Montana, Charli’s vocals have been autotuned beyond recognition, while the brain-numbing 2007 (example lyric: “All from your apartment you can shine bright like a star / Star, star”) left me internally yelling “WHY?”
The end result is incoherence, and a clear split in quality. On the one hand I’m impressed that Charli has had the courage to go down a different path and try something new. On the other, I’m now Googling how to stop the ringing in my ears.
Music, Fashion, Film is out now, via Atlantic Records