For over a decade, Charli XCX was pop's brilliant secret weapon, the artist's favorite artist, but never quite the arena-filling, magazine-cover, Grammy-performing star. Her 2024 confessional electropop album Brat changed all of that, and now her seventh studio album, Music, Fashion, Film, arrives as a dazzling, catchy, and often very funny 30-minute treatise on the machinery of fame.
A Sound That Rewrites the Rules Again
The album's rollout began with an apparent left turn: lead single "Rock Music," all raspy guitar, clattering cymbals, and clipped vocals, sounds nothing like Brat's glossy dancefloor gems. But the shift defines a philosophy more than an aesthetic, one rooted in hanging out and making things with friends, a spirit Charli shares with her longtime collaborators A.G. Cook and Finn Keane across the record's ten concise tracks.
Dissecting Stardom, One Track at a Time
Throughout the album, Charli and her co-writers pick apart the stardom she loves to hate and hates to love. The breezy "SS26" toys with playing the bad girl in a world where everything already feels bad, while "Card Declined" opens as a wry song about being defined by possessions before blooming into a giddy, lovestruck minute of indie pop, seemingly directed at the handbag of her dreams.
Room for Genuine Vulnerability
Amid the irony, the album makes space for real human tenderness. "I'm Afraid," which recalls a Nirvana MTV Unplugged outtake, finds Charli confronting her anxieties about marrying The 1975 drummer George Daniel, while "Magic Metal Montana" is an effusive ode to her longtime collaborator A.G. Cook, celebrating everything from his haircut to his ability to read her musical mind.
The Machinery Behind the Star
Much of the record turns its gaze toward fame's inner workings, nodding to The Velvet Underground along the way. "Camera" hints at a future in film, turning a handful of quickly strummed notes into an ode to fresh ambition, while "2007" rewinds to Charli's earliest days of building her own image from her bedroom, her digitally clipped vocals cutting through the noise: "You're what I want to feel like."
"Wink Wink" and the Art of Self-Awareness
The album's standout, "Wink Wink," oscillates most sharply between authenticity and artifice. Playing with how her public image has been flattened into cliché, and with her own well-documented trolling instincts, Charli's spoken-sung verses erupt into a hyper-catchy chorus built almost entirely around a single note, layering harmonies to build a double persona around double-talk: "I'm not a bad girl anymore, I promise."
A Closing Cameo From David Cronenberg
Charli revisits that same tension with total sincerity on closer "No One Lasts Forever," singing again about being seen as an unruly party girl, this time without irony, just a fearless promise to live in the moment. As the music turns ethereal, she hands the mic to director David Cronenberg, who muses that art can be immortal even when the artists who made it are not, before Charli and her collaborators chant "they're dead, they're gone, no one lasts forever" 27 times, spiraling into something hypnotic and quietly unsettling.
What Comes Next for Pop's Shape-Shifter
As ever-evolving as Charli XCX has proven herself to be, Music, Fashion, Film confirms she's a master of the moment. What she does next remains anyone's guess, and that unpredictability might be exactly the point.
