So: you’ve played a stupid game. Not only that, but you tried pretty fucking hard at it, and everybody saw, and now the stupid prize is in hand. A lot of eyes are on your next move, so you put the stupid prize on the ground, point at it, and laugh. The laugh is not especially convincing. The laugh does not make you better than the prize. The laugh does not undo your very public wanting of the prize in the first place. So you hang your head in shame, and kick rocks.
So goes the conceit of recent global firebrand Charli XCX’s seventh album, Music, Fashion, Film, released hot on the heels of 2024’s sensational Brat and a string of bloodless film roles. It’s an extension of the ideas behind The Moment, her drab and depressive mockumentary in which she fails to play herself, even after doing so spectacularly on the album that the film takes aim at. The Moment, and with this new album, maybe Charli XCX herself, sees Brat as a cynical marketing boardroom circle-jerk rather than what it actually was: a joyful, generational revival of club music in the mainstream that gave the world some desperately needed feminine monoculture.
Music, Fashion, Film is a little funnier, graciously a few more degrees separated from the self-serious moping millionaire at the center of The Moment, but it’s still Charli XCX at her most fractured and self-conscious. She’s still worried about whether people judge her for accepting some dubious checks at the height of her popularity like every other pop star in history has.
Music, Fashion, Film is Charli XCX desperately trying to find something that feels cool, risky, and exciting to her after having her original vision of cool co-opted by some of the most uncool people in the world. It’s honest, unfussy, and sometimes as catchy as anything on Brat, but it asks us to focus on her lyrics more than any other project in her discography, and it simply lacks an interesting premise.
Some welcome holdovers from Brat include: the diaristic stream-of-consciousness lyricism that made “Girl, so confusing” such a triumph; the aloof, chainsmoking, wild-maned cool girl that replaced 2019’s Charli, who rocked a Kool-Aid dip-dyed business bob; and a brazen urge to self-destruct.
Self-destruction has led to several success stories this year, but there’s no hunger at the center of Music, Fashion, Film, no striving spirit, nothing she really wants other than some semblance of normalcy again. She’s seen the true face of a cruel god and is just starting to get her words back.
What’s new: rock music. Music, Fashion, Film is not a rock album per se—prone to glitched-out production tricks and song structures inspired by dance music—but it features more guitars than her last three albums (exactly zero), which to Charli XCX’s typical demographic may as well mean she’s doing a full-length homage to Guns N’ Roses. It’s a steely backdrop to the featherweight and direct songwriting across the album: cool and moody, or clean and cute, somewhere between Garbage and Franz Ferdinand.
Compared to the sensory overwhelm of her previous work, this record can feel underbaked, determined to leave as little of an impression as possible. There are no instantly memorable riffs here, no career-defining chord progressions, but the sound is optimized to keep distractions off of Charli XCX herself. The trouble is Charli also seems reluctant to take the spotlight. Gone are the in-your-face hooks and Charli the hypewoman, replaced by tossed-off confessions that only technically count as singing. There’s a cozy intimacy to the album’s conversational tone. There are times where she can barely be bothered to enunciate, drawling complaints through Marlboro vocal fry, cracking jokes to you like a best friend.
As it follows, where things are kept personal, the album thrives. “Magic Metal Montana”, an ode to longtime collaborator A.G. Cook, is an irresistible and cinematic bit of crunchy alt rock about the comfort of not having to explain yourself to someone who truly gets you. The banality of the lyrics feeds its concept, and lends it a dry, awkward humor that makes it even sweeter: “Love your haircut, love your dance moves / Love your girlfriend, I’d cry if you died.”
“Camera” is the album’s most candid and direct moment, a lament of the various humiliations of pop stardom, especially that of being branded a dead-eyed party girl as you approach 35, no matter how rewarding that image seemed just a few years ago. It’s a freeing shrug of a song, a shedding of self-importance, however inelegant the expression: “I don’t feel embarrassed even if I suck / I’m always craving an experience that feels dangerous.”
More poetic and effective is “No One Lasts Forever”, boasting the record’s strongest statement and chorus. It’s sung from the top of the world, the upper echelons Charli XCX spent her career chasing. It’s a realization that none of it was ever the stuff of life, none of the fabric of humanity. It’s eerie and harrowing, driven home by a looped David Cronenberg—”They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever”—until the sentiment becomes stomach-churning.
The trouble comes when Charli XCX turns outward, attempting to take the industry to task with a stony indifference or smug jokeiness on songs like “Card Declined” and “SS26”. Her take on industry fakery isn’t particularly incisive, and there’s a sense she’s pussyfooting around what she really wants to say, burying her perspective in widely accepted platitudes about opportunism and empty consumption. In “Card Declined”: “I’ll buy some shoes, I’ll buy a smile / I’ll buy some jewelry, a personality / A whole backstory / Card declined.” Ooh, burn! It’s a half-hearted punk rawk middle finger, aspiring to Courtney Love but landing at Avril Lavigne.
That sense of smugness is Music, Fashion, Film‘s fatal flaw, wrapping up too many pivotal moments in so many layers of irony that it quickly becomes tedious to peel them back. Whether the straightforward bro-ish power chords on “Rock Music” are meant to be a joke before A.G Cook runs them through a digital shredder, which is also a punchline; the self-criticism before the critics can say it first on “SS26”; the flatly unfunny “Wink Wink”; the barely-there writing across the project.
There’s an argument to be made that Music, Fashion, Film is designed to alienate the Brat bandwagoners, to test the resolve of new fans with a sharp turn. However, there’s another that it might be a way to lower the pressure on a follow-up to her biggest success ever, hitting restart through a genre she doesn’t seem to have much of an affinity for.
Even the high points on the album feel like skeletal retreads of old territory for Charli XCX. The free-association lyrics on a Brat cut like “Rewind” felt futuristic and high-concept; on Music, Fashion, Film, they feel like an eye-roll. Like, who could be bothered to write good lyrics? It’s hard to make a case for “Magic Mental Montana” over the “So I” remix, or the lazy singalong of “Camera” next to the haunted “I Might Say Something Stupid”.
It seems like for Charli XCX, rock music is the sound of giving no fucks, the sound of being above caring about something. However, what makes her approach to pop music (or pop-adjacent music) so special is her full-hearted nerdiness and obsession over the sound. It’s a sense of curiosity and innovation that is totally missing from Music, Fashion, Film. The album’s midpoint “Yeah” is proof positive: a song about nothing, but engaging all the same because of the way it plays with pace, with buildup and release, with vocal textures silky and abrasive. It’s one of the few times she seems really awake, really in the room with us.
Too many of the other tracks simply aren’t interested in breaking new ground. It lacks the stakes of her other projects, even when her audience was a quarter of its current size. It’s the sound of burnout buried in stylish bombast.