“You don’t get me, you don’t get me, you don’t get me, no you don’t”. So goes the pre-chorus in “Wink Wink”, the eighth track and third single from Charli XCX’s new album, Music, Fashion, Film. In a song with layers upon layers of irony and sarcasm – in which Charli simultaneously renounces, ridicules and propagates her bad girl persona – the line stands out as sincere. In this teen-emo refrain, both very Brat in its defiance and very un-Brat in its grainy delivery, we hear the clear-cut truth.
Because the fact that we don’t get her is the one consistent thing we’ve learned about Charli XCX. She was on the fringes of mainstream pop for a decade before her 2024 dance-pop album Brat sent the world round the twist and made her the most talked-about artist of the year. Though Instagram was flooded with people having “brat summers”, in their strappy tops and sunglasses with their cigarettes and bevs, the album’s reception was further proof that Charli was still five steps ahead: far from an aesthetic ode to partying, Brat was about the deeper feelings underneath those urges. Similarly, in the years leading up to it, Charli was pushing pop forward, a little too cutting edge to connect with people. She was so far ahead she got left behind.
The point is that she’s not just a “365 partygirl” (“everyone thinks… I’m irresponsible and vain… [that] I put the drugs in my veins”, she sings on “No One Lasts Forever”). Nor is she the bulletproof icon that she, like so many other pop stars, is held up to be. She’s insecure, she’s ambivalent, she’s sad, and she is making incredibly interesting music about it.
John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese on the cover of Music, Fashion, FilmHer new album proves yet again that she is the most pioneering pop star of our age – and I have no doubt that many people won’t “get it”. Until, of course, they do. Then – like Brat, like her now-beloved masterpiece “Party 4 U”, like her avant-garde 2016 EP Vroom Vroom – it will suddenly make sense as part of a progression and a narrative, and as one of the few interesting pieces of furniture in the grey-carpeted pop landscape.
Music, Fashion, Film is a deliberate step away from the big beats and screaming synths of Brat, and, as we listen to its scratchy guitars and snippets of spoken lyrics, it will be tempting to reminisce about the bangers that sent us to the moon via the dancefloor. But we shouldn’t forget that hearing “Von Dutch” for the first time back in 2024 felt like an affront to eardrums worldwide, or that the lyrics of “360” seemed utterly bizarre. Now, every time you hear on 6Music or Radio 1, all you hear is artists trying desperately to emulate the Charli XCX of two years ago.
But Charli herself is nothing if not a progressive, and so she ploughs onwards. She has said in interviews that by the time Brat was released and the world got obsessed with it, she was ready to talk about something else. “Rock Music”, the lead single and opener for Music, Fashion, Film, is an experimental meta nod to this urge to move forward – not only Charli’s own, but the industry’s constant demand for novelty. “I think the dancefloor is dead / So now we’re making rock music”, she sings over an assertive, lazy groove, the track glitching heavily on “rock”, before the guitars kick in again. The song was ripped into online, its layers of irony and sarcasm going unnoticed. Sure, it’s a little abrasive, and the lyrics on the nose. In a year’s time, it’ll probably be a classic.
Charli XCX’s new album is very un-Brat with it’s grainy feel and emo influence (Photo: Anna Ross)Her forward-thinking musical style and her heavy interest in imagery and marketing (the Music, Fashion, Film era, contrary to the acid-green of Brat, is all black and white cinematography and leather jackets; the cigarettes, mind you, have remained) contribute to the central misunderstanding of Charli’s work. The hypermodern sound and uber-cool aesthetic give us a lot to engage with at the surface level; look a little closer and you’ll find not only introspection and longing but tragedy and a deep existentialism.
This was the case on Brat, too, of course; here, on Music, Fashion, Film, she takes it even further. Every song on the album, with their My Chemical Romance-inflected melodies, grungy guitars and Charli’s signature autotune, seems to hint at something ineffable. Often, her existential nihilism is not hidden: “Spring summer 26 / When the world is gonna end / No hope for anything”, she sings on “SS26”. The album ends on a repeated spoken sample of the director David Cronenburg: “They are dead, they are gone. No one lasts forever,” he says. It slowly disintegrates into blackness.
But even the most shallow-seeming tracks, like the sugary, nostalgic “2007” or the drawling “Card Declined”, comment on the culture as a manifestation of the human condition. The former is a simultaneously joyous and sad invocation of the current desperation to return to times that seemed simpler; the latter is a sardonic, self-deprecating commentary on using materialism to escape yourself.
Even Charli’s most shallow sounding songs on the album have more nuance than you’d expect (Photo: Anna Ross)The most immediately affecting track on the album is “Magic Metal Montana”, a platonic love song for her best friend and producer, AG Cook. But, the record’s central theme is the vanity and unpredictability of celebrity and the music industry, metabolising the fragile, egotistical world through Essex vocal fry (“fucking shoot me”, she mutters at the end of “Camera”).
And then there’s the song about marriage to her beloved George (Daniel, of The 1975), unpacking her fears and insecurities with striking bluntness. “I’m a wife / I’m a kid / I’m destroyed / I’m a bitch”, she sings. “I’m afraid / I’m afraid / I’m nothing / Without him / What if I / Ruin it / Take the ring / Take the ring”. (One should generally avoid comparing female artists, but it really couldn’t be more different from a 2025 record by a then-soon-to-be-wed pop star on which she rhapsodised about her now-husband’s impressive “manhood” – and, incidentally, wrote a petty diss track about Charli).
But mainly this is a record about the work itself, and all that comes with it in the modern age: it’s art about art, it’s art about how important art is just to stay alive, and it’s art about how unimportant art is, in the grand scheme of things. I think the Brat era already proved that Charli XCX is the most interesting pop star of our times. I hope Music, Fashion, Film will convince people that there is much more going on in her head than “bumpin’ that”.
‘Music, Fashion, Film’ is out now
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