‘Music, Fashion, Film’ review: Charli XCX reinvents (again)

“They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.” These are the last words muttered on the last song of Charli XCX’s new album, Music, Fashion, Film. But it is not the artist herself we’re hearing. Rather, it’s the voice of body-horror auteur David Cronenberg, looping over and over again.

It’s a sample from a conversation Charli XCX had with the director last year about a health crisis in which he collapsed on the sidewalk. She asked him what went through his mind during that moment, if he thought about his art. Cronenberg said he did not. He thought about people, about life. “Hear me assuring you that oblivion is freedom,” he insists. “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.” As the track, “No One Lasts Forever,” comes to a close, Cronenberg’s words loop into a strange song, the morbid-sounding quote becoming almost comforting as bleeping and blooping harmonies intercept it.

After the many collaborations featured on Brat’s remix album, perhaps it seems strange that the only guest on Charli’s new album is David Cronenberg of all people. Still, there is a method to Charli XCX’s madness. On the album cover of Music, Fashion, Film, there is no glimpse of the artist’s signature sunglasses or that mocking brat green.

Charli XCX abandons the Brat aesthetics.

Instead, we get a striking portrait of cultural giants—John Cale, Marc Jacobs, Martin Scorsese—photographed together in a dingy room in New York City. The three are representative of the pillars album, but they’re also emblematic of Charli’s eternal subjects: fame and identity. Some may ask why feature three older, white men— a stark contrast to Brat’s subject of female celebrity dynamics and the artist’s own South Asian identity— but just as in the interview with Cronenberg, it seems that Charli XCX is inserting herself as a peer among these men.

After the rampant success of Brat, an album that defined 2024 and molded the culture into a white tank-top wearing, black-boot strutting, braless wave, it left the question of what would come after. In many ways, Music, Fashion, Film is both an answer to that question and a refusal to acknowledge it. Music, Fashion, Film reaches deeper into the well of  vulnerability and existentialism that Brat touches on. It is an album created from the peak of fame, both looking down on it and also unsure how to escape it.

At the same time, the new album is a refusal to follow in Brat’s footsteps, as the singer steps outside of the club- thumping sound and experiments with rock music’s textures. “Rock Music,” the lead single of the album, was brash, glitchy, and felt like a parody of a Charli XCX song. “I think the dancefloor is dead,” she drawls in a monotone over guitars that hum and buzz as speakers played too loudly at a party, a statement that seemed to abandon her previous album’s main audience.

Music, Fashion, Film finds the artist once again reinventing and playing with sound.

It serves as a reminder that Charli XCX has changed her sound again and again over the past decade, from the power-pop of her 2014 album Sucker to the glitchy, garbled sounds of Pop 2. She wants us to know that despite Brat’s monumental success, she has no problem leaving something behind to create something new.

If anything, Music, Fashion, Film is a noisy, hybrid meditation album about the fame and identity that came alongside Brat’s success. In many ways, Brat’s success allowed the artist to further explore her creativity, delving into the genres of fashion and film in new ways. She constructed a decent album for a terrible film (Emerald Fennell’s lustful, ill-fitted take on Wuthering Heights), provided cameos in multiple television shows, and then produced a creative if unsuccessful spoof documentary, The Moment.

She starred in Saint Laurent’s campaigns and sat front row at the brand’s shows. Even the artist’s Letterboxd has become a cultural fixture with over 400,000 followers. It seems these ventures into different parts of the culture served as the catalyst for her new album as she grappled with her newfound self-importance.

The inner workings of fame and her desires are on display.

“Camera” sets the tone of the whole album. The artist sings about craving performing on film as it brings a violent dispossession: “And maybe this is it, maybe it’s what I need/ ‘Cause it’s the only way to feel like I’m not actually me.” She confesses that the thought of a life in film makes her want to throw her life away in pursuit of something new, something that offers a way out of who she has become.

In search of this “something new,”  XCX proceeds, in her patented style, by way of the material. On the second track of the album “SS26,” an ode to both the fashion and current wildfire seasons, the artist raises a popular question: What good can art do when the world is going to end? The track opens with minimalist guitar lines and subtle drum beats, eventually sliding into Charli’s more familiar distorted, electronic sound. The chorus follows: “Spring, Summer’ 26/ When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it/ Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell/ Nobody’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film.”

The lyrics are a way for the artist to question the utility of her creativity. She then moves into part of her signature style: discussing the inner workings of her fame. She reads out, “Think my politics could work as a press strategy/And my heritage could give me quite the USP.” Charli uses her lyrics to explore self-definition within the industry, opening up to her listeners about how her identity allows her to tap into certain sympathies among her audience and her constant awareness of this.

The singer gets brutally introspective in the standout songs.

On the blunt, fuzzy drawl of “Card Declined,” Charli’s shopping for “a personality/A whole backstory” via luxury goods. There’s no moralized sugar-coating. Charli, always fastidious, attuned to the cultural moment, recognizes that self-commodification has become an everyday reality, one that as a star she is all too familiar with. There’s also that distinct yearning for a different self, which seems to be a throughline of the album. Even the stripping away of her usual Autotune explores the idea of authenticity as she semi-genre hops, shedding one sound for another, one self for another.

She delves even further into her identity and future with tracks like “I’m Afraid” and “Persona.” In “I’m Afraid,” XCX seems to list out all her insecurities and the boxes that she’s afraid of being forced into in her own marriage: “I’m a wife/I’m a kid/I’m destroyed/ I’m a bitch/I’m too drunk/I can’t sleep.” She then goes on to say, “All this pain makes me believe I’m a better artist now
An excuse I tell myself to act selfishly.” Again, XCX prods at her own ego, admitting her own tendency to weaponize her artistic ambitions.

“Don’t fucking choke on your ego when you see me coming,” XCX sings on “Persona,” a track that hides behind the appearance of a diss track but seems to be the artist talking to herself. “I know you’re performing/I know you’re hurting/So you try to hide it when you see me coming/ Don’t wanna confront it, I’m scared I’m annoying.” At the same time, it’s easy to imagine XCX talking to another female celebrity, as in Brat, it’s more about the artist struggling with her own facade of fame and the weight of always performing. If anything, “Persona” functions as a mirror, revealing the artist’s inner dialogue.

Music, Fashion, Film stumbles but offers interesting insight into a constantly changing pop star.

Despite the heavy lyrics of the tracks, XCX manages to enmesh her signature sound with the textures and timbres of rock to produce hybrid tracks; again she has managed to push the boundaries of pop. The album’s sound departs heavily from XCX’s previous projects. Her signature programmed beats or MIDI riffs no longer support the tracks. Instead, producers A.G. Cook and Finn Keane use live instruments— drum kits, synthesizers, and guitars— before shaping them into something new ( he duo admitted to using the AI-powered “audio mosaicing” Concatenator).

In tracks like “2007” and “Yeah” —which are admittedly the lyrically weaker tracks on the album— we do get a stronger sense of how XCX is playing with rock. Both tracks feature an electric guitar riff that becomes increasingly processed until everything combines to sound like a CD skipping.

This stutter only increases till it takes over the song, transforming it from what was supposed to be a rock ballad into a stalled engine with XCX’s vocals occasionally rising to the surface. In time, the tracks slow down to a washed out hum, and the whole chorus repeats itself with XCX seeming to come from behind her own voice in a higher octave. It becomes glaringly obvious that we are not getting rock music; we are getting Charli’s version of rock music.

The bottom line.

Music, Fashion, Film is a masterful, if occasionally chaotic, deconstruction of the very pop stardom Charli XCX perfected on Brat. By trading the sweaty, euphoric catharsis of the club for the jagged, glitching anxieties of processed rock, she forces us to sit with the uncomfortable realities of fame, aging, and the relentless pressure to reinvent. When David Cronenberg’s voice loops that “oblivion is freedom” at the record’s close, it no longer sounds like a grim surrender. Instead, it feels like a hard-won revelation. For Charli XCX, obliterating the past to build a strange, uncertain future isn’t just freedom—it is the only way she knows how to survive.

Music, Fashion, Film is out now. 

---

Image courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corporation.