Decoding Charli XCX’s new album, Music, Fashion, Film

Charli XCX was supposed to be taking a break.

Her sixth album, Brat, was the sort of record you could genuinely call era-defining, without being accused of overstating its significance.

Experimental but accessible songs like Guess, Apple and 360 propelled the star to new heights of fame.

Her album was co-opted into Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, and Collins English Dictionary updated its definition of Brat, to acknowledge its use as an adjective characterising the music’s “confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude”.

After a punishing year-long tour, the singer accepted a few acting roles, wrote the soundtrack to Emerald Fennel’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights and married her longterm partner George Daniel.

But instead of settling down, she found herself back in the studio.

“Out of the blue, inspiration struck me,” she says. “I suddenly felt like I had something to say, so I ran with it.”

In a matter of weeks, she dashed off 11 short, guitar-based songs that tried to make sense of her whirlwind two years.

The resulting album, titled Music, Fashion, Film, is smart, self-referential, funny, antagonistic and crammed full of moments to stimulate your inner earworm.

Significantly, deliberately, it’s not Brat 2.0.

“If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” she told Vogue in the first interview for the album.

“To be boring is to die right there on the spot,” she added in a newsletter to fans. “Give up, give in, go home, stay home, end it all.”

As a result, there’s a lot to uncover in the music and lyrics. Here’s what we learned.

In the aforementioned Vogue article, Charli played the interviewer a track called Rock Music, featuring the lyric: “I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making rock music”.

The publication took that as gospel, calling Music, Fashion, Film the star’s “rock reinvention”.

Fans recoiled. Courtney Love accused Charli of being a troll. Madonna captioned a photo, “If your dance floor feels dead, maybe you’re playing the wrong music.”

But while guitars are the album’s predominant sound, it’s far from being a rejection of club music. Even the song Rock Music is full of manipulated vocals and electronic flourishes.

“I never said I was making a rock album,” Charli posted on Instagram, explaining that the song was really about her relationship with the Brat album.

“I’ve made electronic-leaning music for over a decade,” she told music YouTuber Nicky Reardon.

“That’s shaped who I am as an artist. [Rock Music] is kind of about my pivot from that as an artist who doesn’t want to continue to do the same thing over and over and over again.”

Rather than a picture of Charli, the album is being promoted with a stylish black-and-white photo of Velvet Underground musician John Cale, fashion designer Marc Jacobs, and film director Martin Scorsese.

The trio epitomise excellence in their respective fields – reflecting the album’s overarching theme of art, excellence and immortality.

The photo was taken in New York this April, by Scottish filmmaker Aidan Zamiri, who’s been behind the camera for some of Charli’s recent music videos, as well as her mockumentary The Moment.

“Honestly it was a really emotional day,” the singer told BBC 6 Music’s Nick Grimshaw.

“I was like, ‘Wow, these three people mean so much to me personally as an artist’. And I couldn’t believe that they were all together, you know?

“We were so nervous and then when it was happening it was just honestly really sweet.”

On Rock Music, Charli admits that the head-banging physicality of the Brat tour ended up giving her nerve damage in her neck.

“It really impacts a lot on my sleep habits,” she told Sam Murphy on the Pop Pod, saying the pain had got “progressively worse over the past couple of years”.

“When I think about touring this record I do think I should probably be taking a different approach,” she added. “But who knows where I’ll end up on that front, you know? Sometimes I just can’t stop myself.”

Fans got a glimpse of how things might change at a secret show in London last week, where Charli performed some of her new material for the first time.

Flanked by a tight, three piece band, the set was less demanding from a body-slamming perspective, without sacrificing the energy of the music.

Reviews weren’t allowed – but let’s just say the new material, with its distorted guitars and punchy drums, sounded even better live.

Charli’s new songs find her grappling with whether she can stay true to her pugnacious, subversive roots while enjoying commercial success and personal happiness.

The slinky single SS26 discusses the pressure on pop stars to do and say the right things.

Lyrically, Charli disavows cigarettes and writes sincere apologies for her past mistakes. She even talks about using her politic as a “press strategy”, noting that her part-Indian heritage “could give me quite the USP”.

Laced with sarcasm, it highlights the idiocy of holding celebrities to unattainable standards, instead of letting music (and fashion and film) explore the darker side of human nature.

“If you’re on the internet, there’s this feeling like you need to be on the right side of every single conversation,” Charli told Nicky Reardon.

“You can’t just be good. You have to be the right type of good, in a specific way and if not, you’re a bad person who actually had a sinister motive this entire time. So the song is actually talking about my experience with that.”

Equally compelling is the single Wink Wink, where Charli emphasises her newfound maturity – wearing trousers, driving sensible cars – before admitting it’s all a pose.

“I’m not a bad girl anymore / Wink, wink.”

But the most nakedly honest lyric comes on I’m Afraid – potentially the least romantic song ever written about getting engaged.

“Happiness came in a box,” Charli says of the proposal, before spiralling into a panic about who she’ll become if she says “yes”.

“I’m a wife, I’m a kid / I’m destroyed, I’m a bitch / I’m too drunk, I can’t sleep / I can’t feel, I’m afraid / I’m nothing without him / What if I ruin it?” she sings, as discordant synths rip apart the sonic fabric.

Connecting the songs is the idea that everyone’s flawed – but the mess and the friction make life more interesting.

If the lyrics on Brat were direct and unembellished, Charli’s new album takes minimalism to an extreme.

The seventh song, Yeah, is a textbook example of tension and release in pop music – that strips the idea down to its most elemental form.

For the first 30 seconds, Charli simply repeats the phrase, “I don’t wanna,” over and over while a guitar chugs in the background.

Then, just when you’re about to hit the off switch, she declares: “Wait! Now I wanna feel it,” and the music explodes into life.

It’s so stupid and basic, and yet it scratches a tried-and-tested musical itch with such precision that you have to admire its audacity.

Yeah is the most demo-like song on a 29-minute album that occasionally feels under-cooked. But the brevity was quite deliberate.

“I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I must make an album with tiny songs’,” Charli told Nick Grimshaw.

“That was just the way that the songs came out. It was just a choice that felt right for the music that we were making.”

Charli is an avowed film buff, whose fifth album was named after David Cronenberg’s notorious body-horror film Crash.

The Canadian director is also the last voice you hear on Music, Fashion, Film, in an excerpt of an “hour-long” conversation he had with Charli last year,.

“What’s crazy is he actually spoke in tune with the song, without ever having heard it,” she told Australia’s Triple J radio station.

In the clip, Cronenberg talks about the legacy of art, and whether longevity really matters.

“Yes, some artists have created art that has really survived for thousands of years, and that’s fantastic,” he says. “But experientially, for them, they are dead. They are gone. They’re not experiencing that.”

That’s not a cause for sadness, he insists. It means you shouldn’t be burdened by the success (or failure) of your work.

“Oblivion is freedom.”

It feels like he’s showing Charli the escape route from post-Brat expectations. On the evidence of this album, she’s already made it through the door.