“One for them, one for me.” That’s a movie-making philosophy often attributed to Martin Scorsese, capturing the seesawing cadences of a film career: make a commercial project and then a personal one. It’s tempting to view Charli XCX’s eighth album, ‘Music, Fashion, Film’, through Marty’s mantra (he appears on the album cover, after all, alongside her other artistic GOATs John Cale and Marc Jacobs). The world turned her go-for-broke club-pop opus ‘Brat’ into the biggest album of her career and a cultural phenomenon, and Charli has responded by coolly spiking any and all ensuing expectations of her and her music.
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When ‘Brat’ summer broke, Charli wasted little time narrativising her own dizzying rise, responding in real-time through remixes and her own satirical film The Moment. She also swiftly seized the new creative opportunities, often in film, afforded her by the commercial and critical acclaim. Charli didn’t expect to follow ‘Brat’ up so soon, she told Rolling Stone: “I felt very creatively drained and not inspired to write anything new. Then suddenly, inspiration came.” ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ is a snapshot of an artist in the thick of it, whose sense of self is warping on movie sets, in fashion fittings, and beneath the bad-faith glare of the (social) media machine.
The album wears an ironic smirk in the face of it all – but lightly, and not always. Charli does occasionally bait the highly strung stan-puritans who clutched their pearls over the hedonistic posture of ‘Brat’ and can only think in terms of mothers or flops, eras and rebrands. These gotchas, so obvious and risible, are thankfully rare. “We kiss each other, real incestuous vibes / I knew you’d like that,” goes ‘Rock Music’; right after taunting the listener that she maybe “fucked your dad” on the OTT-horny ‘Wink Wink’, Charli’s explanation is witheringly straightforward: “Just kidding, I’m only saying that for effect / But my point is I think people can change.”
People can change; in fact, artists must. Here, Charli and her fellow executive producers A. G. Cook and Finn Keane challenge even her most diehard fans to accept her in a new mode: ‘rock music’. It’s a deceptively versatile palette: crunchy digitised rock that can balloon out into shiny alien textures (‘Card Declined’) or compress into grunge-lite riffing that smells just a bit like teen spirit (‘Yeah’). Crucially, it’s unfriendly when it needs to be – the riffs turn booming and distorted on ‘Persona’, as ugly as the song’s insufferable, hypocritical subjects.
‘Brat’ catapulted Charli into another level of the cultural stratosphere, and ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ – which was recorded during Paris Fashion Week 2025 – is a missive from that rarefied air. She has fun playing the villain here, often ditching the AutoTune for unadorned talk-singing, an excellent tool for embodying the dead-eyed vapidity of modern celebrity. She’s never sounded more alienated than she has whisking new toys and personalities off the rack on ‘Card Declined’; her mincing delivery on the chorus of ‘2007’ lends the song a self-aware preciousness.
Charli swings between playing the game and apprehending it, showing and telling. And when she’s keen to tell she does so with uncommon clarity, dispassionately breaking down her “politics as a press strategy” and “heritage as a USP” on ‘SS26’ while venting some of her biggest anxieties on the painfully raw ‘I’m Afraid’. As we’ve learned on ‘Brat’, with Charli the earnestness is sweeter when you’ve had to work for it. And when you get to ‘Magic Metal Montana’, her tender ode to Cook, her longest collaborator, it’s downright beautiful. Charli gives him the highest praise she could: “You make it easy for me,” she murmurs as Cook’s stuttering synth responds by setting us off on a glorious sprint.
The toil and transformative thrill of artistic creation animate the most vital songs on ‘Music, Fashion, Film’. Art’s ability to let you feel “something new and undiscovered / And something kind of violent” is enough to make you want to “throw your life away”, Charli declares on the luminous ‘Camera’. And she leaves it to legendary director David Cronenberg to hammer it home on the carpe-diem conclusion ‘No One Lasts Forever’: “Some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years and that’s fantastic, but experientially, for them, they are dead. They are gone. No one lasts forever.” ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ can feel fragmentary and fleeting, distracted by its imagined, hyper-contemporary audience. But its celebration of art – and its capacity to let you transcend your bounds for something new – feels urgent and timeless.
Details
Record label: Atlantic Records
Release date: July 24, 2026
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