Charli xcx has spent three months telling everybody what her seventh album isn’t. Not a rock record, despite the guitars. Not a comeback, despite arriving just over two years after the biggest cultural event of her career. Released on 24 July through Atlantic Records, Music, Fashion, Film runs eleven songs and just over half an hour, recorded with AG Cook and Finn Keane during Paris Fashion Week, in a compressed run of studio sessions. She’d finished Brat drained enough to wonder if she wanted to make another record at all, and it was Cook who talked her into writing anyway. Most of that half hour is spent picking apart what happens to a person once the internet decides they matter.
A Vogue cover promised a rock reinvention, then the lead single ran under two minutes and undercut its own guitar riff with a joke about the dancefloor being dead. She followed that with a video clarifying that no, she never actually said she was making a rock album, thanks. By the time “Wink Wink” swapped in at the last minute for what was meant to be the campaign’s second single, the whole rollout had turned into the same performance the songs were describing. Confusing the audience isn’t a side effect here. It’s the method.
The cover makes the ambition literal: John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese, one for each word in the title, three men who’ve spent decades being taken seriously in exactly the way pop stars rarely are. Spend half an hour with the record and it starts to sound like she’s still working out whether she belongs at that table.
What’s odd is how much more coherent the actual songs are than the noise around them. Opener “Rock Music” sets the tone in ninety seconds flat, all crunched-up guitar and a chorus that treats her own genre pivot as a punchline before anyone else can. “SS26” follows with the album’s most straightforwardly gorgeous melody wrapped around lyrics about a runway heading nowhere good, catastrophising and cat-walking in the same breath. “Wink Wink” arrives a few tracks later doing something similar with less to say, a breezy 00s indie-sleaze pastiche built around her repeating that she’s not a bad girl anymore until the claim starts to sound like the opposite of proof.
On “Card Declined,” the shopping list stops being a joke. Over a chugging, fuzzed-out guitar line, she runs through a list that starts as a bit about buying a personality and gradually exposes the grief underneath it, the transaction repeatedly failing, the want never actually going away. Its comedown stretches into a minute of wistful pop the record is much better for having.
“Camera” is the other one that holds up against repeat listens. It’s built around her anxiety over trying a second career in her thirties, the fear of looking stupid in front of people who already decided who she’s supposed to be, and it turns that fear into exhilaration instead, without ever quite promising the listener it’ll work out. She’s traced the video back to a single photograph: James Dean, drained, between takes on Giant, the film he never lived to see released, still getting camera-ready anyway. It’s a strange picture to build a pop song around, and it explains why “Camera” plays like a private argument she’s having with herself about whether any of this is worth it, not another version of herself designed to be easily understood.
“2007” reaches further back, to the bedroom-pop years when a teenager with a laptop could build an audience without a label or a machine behind her. It’s the same nostalgia trick she and Troye Sivan pulled on “1999,” pointed at an earlier target this time: the version of the internet that first made her possible. Before followers became metrics and identity became branding, there was still room to disappear into the music.
“I’m Afraid” is the album’s bleakest three minutes, dragging a low, grungy guitar line under a confession that starts as cold feet about marrying into a new life and ends somewhere far more personal, tying her insecurity back to her father’s absence at her own birth. The real subject arrives in the second verse, when she suggests the hurt might be less something she’s working through than something she’s using, a private justification for treating people badly because it keeps the songs coming. She doesn’t answer whether she believes that. She just leaves it on the table.
Between those songs sits a run of tracks that feel like loose pages from the same diary. “Magic Metal Montana” is a tender thank-you note to AG Cook, the kind of song about a producer that pop stars almost never bother writing because producers are meant to stay invisible. “Persona” turns the same tenderness inside out, aimed at a friend who performs sincerity so well that nobody, possibly including the friend, can tell where the act stops. It also complicates the album’s own diary conceit: sincerity performed this convincingly starts to look like just another persona. “Yeah” is the shortest and slightest thing here, built almost entirely from a two-line back-and-forth about wanting to feel something, doing more for the album’s pacing than it does as a song anyone will seek out on its own. None of these are hooks you’ll be singing on the bus. They sit closer to overheard conversation, the sort you only fully understand once you’ve caught the second half of it.
Across all of it, Cook and Keane keep the production close and a little rough: guitars left with their fuzz on, the drums pushed down in the mix, her voice moving between a flat, vocoded drawl and a pitched-up, almost childish trill, with far less of the Auto-Tune sheen that defined Brat. She’s described the album as being, in part, about how lucky she feels to do any of this, and there are moments, mostly on “Camera,” where that gratitude actually comes through. But the anxiety wins the argument almost everywhere else.
Closer “No One Lasts Forever” is the album’s biggest swing, handing several minutes over to David Cronenberg reciting an account of a near-death experience that loops into something close to a mantra before the track finally lets it go. The nerve of it is more interesting than the six minutes are enjoyable to sit through.
Music, Fashion, Film is far less interested in winning people over than Brat ever was. There’s no “360,” no single moment built to conquer a summer. What it offers instead is a strange account of what it’s like to have your art turn into a meme and then have to make something new anyway. The whole thing sounds like a woman thinking out loud in a room she didn’t expect anyone to be listening in. The loop breaks before the thought does. She closes the diary before the question has an answer.
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