All I Know is How it Makes Me Feel

In the two years since its release, Charli xcx has all but rebuffed the overwhelming success that her sixth album—the slimy opus Brat—had brought her. This is an artist, after all, whose entire career prior to 2024 had hinged on a tension between mainstream popularity and niche experiments. Of course the singer, who zigs when most others would zag, would release a mockumentary spoofing what it would’ve looked like if she sold out to corporate shills. Of course she’d do the Wuthering Heights soundtrack for no obvious reason other than a creative challenge. By the time she was still touring Brat a year after its release, a few friends remarked to me that she seemed bored. Who can blame her?

That discomfort with success—a bristling against what’s expected of pop stars—is a recurring theme on xcx’s seventh album, Music, Fashion, Film. On the moody single ‘SS26’, she stamps out the metaphorical cigarettes (a noted Brat trademark) and alludes to a tweet of hers that went viral by accident: “Think my politics could work as a press strategy / And my heritage could give me quite thе USP.” It’s an exercise in self-awareness from the perpetually self-aware pop star, and one of the more successful, developed tracks from a list of prototypes. It is, like much of Music, Fashion, Film, interesting as a snapshot of a star at a unique juncture in her career. You’ve altered pop culture in an immeasurable way (the true definition of a cultural reset), triggered a minor shift in American politics and had the best sales of your career. What next?

xcx doesn’t seem to be sure. Her best work is often a response to something (her mixtape era a course-correct from the tepidly received Sucker, her 2020 masterpiece a product of forced isolation, her Brat summer derived as the reverse of her ‘sellout popstar’ Crash era). She is not an artist who likes to be put in boxes, and refuses to be pinned down. But Music, Fashion, Film is the first of these thought experiments to falter in execution. Its fallibility and ephemerality is kind of the point, but it’s a frustrating point to listen to.

Let me put it this way: records like How I’m Feeling Now and Brat worked in part because they felt like first drafts (and, in the case of the former, some of them were). They felt very off-the-cuff in a way that felt candid without milking it. Take ‘Rewind’, an under-discussed Brat cut: “Feel embarrassed when I call up the paparazzi,” she sang. “Everyone else does it constantly.” They’re not complex lyrics, but they were prescient and spoke to the cultural moment in a way that felt indelible, even timeless—beneath all that specificity was a deeply felt tale of a woman wanting to be popular but shying away vampirically from the spotlight.

Music, Fashion, Film’s candour feels calculated and forced in comparison. “It’s complicated how I feel, know I’m not supposed to say,” she sings on the angsty ‘I’m Afraid’. “But I have to get it out so my insides don’t turn black.” It has the odd, paradoxical effect of feeling both overthought and underwritten, like on the unfortunately laughable ‘Card Declined’: “I’ll buy some shoes, I’ll buy a smile / I’ll buy some jewellery, a personality / A whole backstory, card declined!” It’s subtle as a brick: the point about the empty thrill of materialism is a tale as old as time, and the punchline plays like parody.

Where even the maximalist Brat had nuance and layers (essays could be spun out of ‘Sympathy is a Knife’ alone), Music, Fashion, Film tries to beat you over the head with capital-T themes yet shies away at every critical juncture and shrugs off any kind of sincerity. The record deals principally with art and why we make it, particularly from xcx’s unique vantage point. Third single ‘Wink Wink’, whose concept you can probably guess from the title, is one of several tracks that purport to dissect the idea of persona. But it lands with the incision of a butter knife. “Maybe I fucked your dad / Just kidding, I’m only saying that for effect,” she sings atop a skipping beat. “But my point is I think people can change.”

The point here, of course, is that xcx’s ‘party girl’ identity has been retired and she’s on a different level now (expressed by a couple of admittedly witty lines in the second verse: “I used to say ‘scream if you wanna go faster!’ / But then I sold my Porsche”). She doesn’t dress provocatively anymore, and she’s definitely not a bad girl. Or is she? Wink wink! It becomes an exhaustingly smug sentiment after a few listens, and although this refusal to commit to a point is the point, it doesn’t disguise its faux-intellectual quality. This is, it pains me to say, shallow music that wants to use its self-awareness to mask how little it’s saying; if you don’t like it, xcx seems to be saying, you just don’t get it. But its vague gestures circle around a point that is never made. (“But I didn’t do it, even if I did,” she sings on ‘SS26’.) It’s the kind of ‘it’s not failing if I’m aware that I’m failing’ mentality that she hasn’t really played by before.

It’s worth noting, too, that Music, Fashion, Film feels like the first album of xcx’s career where context is everything; you can appreciate the shallow pop pleasures of Crash without knowing it’s intended as parody; you needn’t have been present for xcx’s 2020 Instagram Lives to read into the paranoid and lonely lyrics of How I’m Feeling Now. This new album, meanwhile, feels like an in-joke, like on lead single ‘Rock Music’, a kind of mission statement about saying ‘fuck it’ and going guitar with it. It’s less interesting than the (exhausting) thinkpieces about the ‘dancefloor’ line make it sound, and its central thesis about trying and maybe failing at something new (“Yeah, maybe jump off the stage / I hope they catch you today / But if they don’t, it’s okay”) is itself not an original or profound statement. It’s incredibly self-congratulatory, as though the act of switching lanes is something to be applauded.

Sonically the record is an acquired taste, not quite ‘rock music’ but also not pop, sitting somewhere in between. The textures are alien but become tedious on repeat listens, the tinny guitars and close vocals having the effect of aural sandpaper. It just sounds anaemic, especially considering xcx has actually made full-blooded, propulsive rock music before (‘London Queen’, anyone?). Yet there are good bits. I like the writing on ‘2007’, at least before it’s repeated and run into the ground. I like the guitars on ‘Yeah’, the delayed drop surprising like the lightness in your stomach on a rollercoaster. And ‘Camera’ genuinely feels like a new staple in xcx’s discography, a haunting and moving paean to public figuredom that surveys how and why we behave the way we do when we think we’re being judged. It’s the only piece of the record that feels genuinely vital and new, that feels like it’s saying something we haven’t heard from xcx before.

Because what do we learn from Music, Fashion, Film? The overwhelming terror of juggling personal and private life on ‘I’m Afraid’? It’s potent, but is more incisively explored in the devastating Bon Iver rework of Brat’s ‘I Think About It All The Time’. The repeated idea of legacy? That crops up on ‘So I’, which functions as a Sophie eulogy as well as an examination of xcx’s own legacy as an artist and a friend. The concept of art being a salve to the world ending? That was the impetus behind How I’m Feeling Now, a record brought about by the misery of COVID lockdowns and xcx feeling like her art was the only thing to give her purpose.

There is something about being bored by this album that makes me feel like a bitter hag, as both a music writer and yearslong fan of xcx. Yet as someone who fits squarely into this album’s target audience (xcx scholar, lover of art about making art), I can’t help but be dishearteningly nonplussed by this record, which feels cobbled together from odds and ends. There’s not an awful lot to latch onto. I think an interesting comparison to make—and stick with me here—is Addison, the adored self-titled debut from a protégé of xcx. That album worked because of its goofy charm, and was enjoyable as a simple and frilly celebration of early 2000s pop. Yet it was also a deeply felt meditation on changing identity (‘New York’), on performance and persona (‘In The Rain’), on clinging to art as an escape (‘Headphones On’).

Music, Fashion, Film is an album to be understood and analysed rather than enjoyed—a pretentious cinephile’s dream of an album. It comes close to invoking something new on the closer, ‘No One Lasts Forever’. Not in xcx’s own lyrics, which are mostly just an inconsequential vignette followed by a repetition of the title, but in a spoken-word feature from film director David Cronenberg, who recounts a near-death experience. To the ostensible shock of xcx, who has long made art her raison d’être (a recent B-side of hers was literally titled ‘If You Take Away The Music Then What Has She Got), Cronenberg confesses that he wasn’t thinking about his art but about his life and the relationships he’d formed. He ends with a poignant, startling message that artists who leave behind a grand artistic legacy still won’t get to experience the fruits of their labour, and should instead balance their time on earth with family and friends. Then, the point is hammered home by a minute and a half (!) of Cronenberg repeating “They are dead, they are gone, no-one lasts forever.” It has all the subtlety of an Aronofsky film.