{"id":824701,"date":"2026-07-25T06:23:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T06:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/824701\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T06:23:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T06:23:08","slug":"charli-xcx-music-fashion-film-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/824701\/","title":{"rendered":"Charli XCX \u2018Music, Fashion, Film\u2019 Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Take the mindless, bare-bones charm of \u201cYeah,\u201d<\/a> a sassy refusenik rocker on which Charli, in her classic deadpan, repeats over and over how much she doesn\u2019t want to feel anything \u2014 before cuing a cathartic, blown-out chorus when she suddenly admits that now she does want to feel. (Charli can inject wry humor into even the tersest lines; consider all she can do with a simple \u201cwow\u201d in the pixelated garage band opener \u201cRock Music.\u201d<\/a>) Another highlight, the swaggering pop-punk banger \u201cPersona,\u201d<\/a> is one of those self-lacerating diss songs that Charli perfected on \u201cBrat,\u201d although this time the atmosphere is augmented by the steely din of buzz saw guitars.<\/p>\n

Despite its lead single\u2019s humorously demonstrative lyrics (\u201cI think the dance floor is dead so now we\u2019re making rock music\u201d), this is not exactly a traditional rock album. Guitars hiccup, glitch or slowly bleed blooms of pooling distortion, serving merely as jumping-off points for the buoyant digital imaginations of Charli\u2019s longtime collaborators, the producers A.G. Cook (their friendship is the subject of the sweetest song on the album, \u201cMagic Metal Montana\u201d<\/a>) and Finn Keane. Here, they revel in grungy textures and states of decay as much as they usually do in highly reflective pop gloss.<\/p>\n

If we must assign a genre, let\u2019s call it Letterboxd-core, after the cinephile social media site of which Charli is a power user.<\/a> Since \u201cBrat,\u201d Charli has also begun a prolific acting career, appearing in such interesting, under-the-radar fare as the travelogue indie \u201cErupcja\u201d and the horror remake \u201cFaces of Death.\u201d (She\u2019s also shooting an upcoming slasher with the Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike and an art-world satire directed by Cathy Yan, among other projects.)<\/p>\n

On one of the album\u2019s highlights, the wrenching and remarkably candid \u201cCamera,\u201d Charli openly admits that she enjoys acting so much that she has fantasized about making a \u201cFrench exit\u201d from her pop career. \u201cIt makes me want to throw my life away,\u201d Charli sings with palpable angst, of her newfound love of acting, atop guitar chords that flicker like yawning shutters. She\u2019s not even sure she\u2019s a particularly good actress yet \u2014 \u201cI don\u2019t feel embarrassed even if I suck\u201d \u2014 but that uncertainty gives her a thrill that music cannot always provide.<\/p>\n

In October 2024, Charli released a star-studded remix album that served as a companion piece to \u201cBrat\u201d and implicitly proved how many A-list pop stars (Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Lorde) were now willing to answer her call to hop on a track. On this new album, though, she opts for only one featured artist \u2026 and it\u2019s the 83-year-old body horror film auteur David Cronenberg. (News that, perhaps in homage to his 1981 cult classic \u201cScanners,\u201d certainly made some heads explode.) Charli\u2019s die-hards \u2014 called Angels, naturally \u2014 know that she has subtly referenced Cronenberg before, in the title and sex-meets-vehicular-violence cover image of her 2022 album \u201cCrash.\u201d But here Cronenberg\u2019s surprisingly serene voice is the focal point, as he recounts, in an extended and genuinely moving spoken-word outro, the wisdom he gleaned from a near-death experience.<\/p>\n

Lying on the pavement, wondering if he was dying, Cronenberg says, he thought not about the art he\u2019d made or his legacy, but the people in his life. He realized that even the rarefied artists whose work has endured centuries aren\u2019t immortal: \u201cThey are dead, they are gone. No one lasts for ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is ending an album this way a cop-out \u2014 a way of saying none of it matters? Charli, on the contrary, seems to find this reminder of transience artistically freeing, especially in the wake of her prior success. But even from the edge of existential oblivion, she and her co-conspirators can\u2019t help but looking for the pop hook, and so they end the album by chopping up and looping Cronenberg\u2019s voice into a rhythmic sample: \u201cThey are dead, they are gone \u2014 no one lasts forever.\u201d Ashes to ashes, brat to brat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Take the mindless, bare-bones charm of \u201cYeah,\u201d a sassy refusenik rocker on which Charli, in her classic deadpan,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":824702,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[245486,49,48,9083,75,1187,288299,341,236921],"class_list":["post-824701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-actors-and-actresses","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-charli-xcx","tag-entertainment","tag-fashion","tag-film-album","tag-music","tag-pop-and-rock-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=824701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/824702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=824701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=824701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=824701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}