Critic-at-Large: Charli xcx shows no signs of stopping

Music, Fashion, Film

Charli xcx shows no signs of stopping 

As I wrote earlier this year, Charli xcx has known for a while now that she needs to escape out from under the towering legacy of her 2024 opus brat. She’d been an important left-of-field pop star since at least 2017’s mixtape Pop 2, but brat was bigger than anyone could’ve anticipated. One of the more lucid pleasures of my life—and for music kids like myself—was rolling to Charli deep cuts like “Track 10” in a field full of strangers at 2025’s Laneway. For me—for us!—it signalled something amazing: it was the music of our bedrooms and our closets spilling out into real, public life; it was an idea made substantiated; it was music of a queer underground blown up large, and not dulled in its spark or blunted in its edges in the process. If you go for a walk down Courtenay Place on a Friday night, it may strike you as it has struck me that a lot of straight people go out looking for a reason to stay home; looking for somebody to go home with. Queer people, by contrast, have always organised ourselves around nightlife, because it’s a relief to just be out. I cannot stress enough that for this alone Charli will always remain for some of us a most extraordinary musician.

But, like anything so popular that even the Hallenstein's boys were frat-flicking to it, there was always the risk that brat’s nervous, twitchy take on dance music—a take that, mind you, was deeply rooted in the UK’s queer and experimental scenes of the early ‘10s—would curdle into something uncool. And Charli made those fears real as part of the mockumentary The Moment that she made with long-time collaborator Aidan Zamiri, which came out this January. It’s not a great film, but its achievement comes in part from how it manifests all the things that brat was not. It depicts a Charli who’s anxious, unsure, and uncertain—she does lame brand deals (a brat-green credit card!), and has her vision for her concert tour stepped all over by an infuriatingly smarmy Alexander Skarsgård, and gets so stressed out that halfway through rehearsals she takes a mental health break in Ibiza. Very much unlike the tragic heroine of The Moment, the best records of Charli’s career have been defined by decisive stylistic turns and surefire confidence. Her early 2026 release Wuthering Heights, intended as a companion album to the Emerald Fennel film and used as part of its soundtrack, saw her pivot, as I wrote earlier this year, to a denser orchestral sound while retaining her aphoristic lyric gift. Music, Fashion, Film is the latest in the winning zigzag streak of her career—but it's tougher and in some ways more disappointing for its sheer messiness. 

Opener and lead single “Rock Music” poses itself as a thesis statement: “I think the dancefloor is dead / So now we’re making rock music” goes its chorus. But both of these claims turn out to be untrue. The album styles itself (quite compellingly) as a kind of dance-rock fusion; the songs here are, in many ways, typical Charli tracks dressed up by electric guitar riffs that could just as easily have been synth lines. Its songs are structurally akin to both Charli’s own previous work (please see the ludicrously underrated how i’m feeling now) and to outsider jangle-rockers like Blur. That band broke with the rockist emphasis on “authenticity” back in the 90s with their “Song 2,” risky for how it ends up sounding like the very thing it's making fun of and clever too for precisely the same reason—its both good-old-fashioned rock headbanger and snarky satire. Charli makes a rather Blur-ry stab at the same trick here on this record—and she even has a song, “Yeah,” that interpolates theirs directly. A trick like this one, though, relies a lot on context and on intertextual reference. “Yeah” works, but it doesn’t work for the reason that, say, its Genius annotators think it does; it doesn’t, as they claim, “[contextualise] the idea of becoming a ‘yes man’ for both the public and the musical industry.” Rather, it’s made up of quite literally four empty phrases sung in alternation: “I don’t wanna,” “Now I wanna feel it,” “You don’t wanna,” “You’re so predictable.” What I’m getting at is that most of Music, Fashion, Film doesn’t work as song. And, when you’ve been paying attention to what Charli can do with her miniaturist's brush on albums like how i’m feeling now and Wuthering Heights, this album might feel a little too slight and unambitious, a little too underworked. 

Then there are the moments of winning, to-be-expected, surefire confidence. “SS26” is blissfully catchy; the guitar riff sidles up to the syncopation of the melody in a way that is unbelievably satisfying, almost recitative-like, and thus brings out the speechiness of Charli’s melody writing without reducing melody to speech (as “Yeah” runs the risk of doing). It’s also hard not to hear the song as a meditation on the climate crisis: “Walking on a runway that goes straight to hell / Nothing’s gonna save us / Not music, fashion, or film,” Charli deadpans in a lexapro haze. In a world where “politics could work as a press strategy” and every mistake is “taken out of context, obviously” on social media, it’s hard to summon any feeling at all, whether optimism about the future or merely a committed pessimism. Much has already been made of the fine closer, “No One Lasts Forever,” which teases out a more overtly existential pitch that the album encircles and whose instrumental, built on a guitar ostinato so distorted it sounds like a synth, returns us to the electronic wheelhouse of the rest of Charli’s discography precisely by showing how, despite this album’s rock exterior, we never really left it. Elsewhere, the two-track diptych of “Wink Wink” and “Persona” tackles the tension between Charli xcx and Charlotte Aitchison, phrasing stardom as a kind of trick mirror that shows you fatter or slimmer or taller or shorter than you actually are. But Charli’s angle takes one of pop music’s oldest (and potentially most alienating) tropes—the lament about fame—and lowers it to an anxious simmer, such that her subject becomes social life more generally. And more intimately: aren’t parts of “Persona” addressed to a close friend or lover? “You call mе your best friend to keep me at arm's lеngth / [...] / You know I see you when you see me,” Charli sings. 

Being seen and seeing in turn are recurring obsessions of this album, because Charli is one of our great polishers of surfaces, and because Music, Fashion, Film is something of her Ars Poetica—it’s her treatise on her craft. Like any good pop star, however, that means that its topics range from songwriting, singing, and musicianship to public life, celebrity culture, public image, and legacy—a pop star is both an artist and a brand, an image and an advertisement; both fine art and practical art. But that also means that it covers, thematically speaking, everything she’s already covered in her discography; it offers up no fresh material. And in that sense, it’s possibly her most limited project yet. (Another short mixtape-style album full of pithy turns of phrase and electro-grungy instrumentals? Who would’ve guessed?) Still, Music, Fashion, Film reaches and then sustains an existential pitch that has as yet been out of her range, and combines that with a tossed-off haphazardness of execution which forms in itself the only real defense against mortal dread: pretending like any of this was easy. “And I know deep down that it's here and now / 'Cause nothing's gonna last forever” (“No One Lasts Forever”).