{"id":566455,"date":"2026-07-24T19:35:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T19:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/566455\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T19:35:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T19:35:10","slug":"charli-xcxs-new-album-music-fashion-film-finds-her-questioning-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/566455\/","title":{"rendered":"Charli XCX\u2019s new album Music, Fashion, Film finds her questioning it all."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

The primary impulse I have after listening to Charli XCX\u2019s new album is not to debate whether it\u2019s the proper, or perhaps properly improper, follow-up to the pop singer\u2019s 2024 season<\/a>-and-color<\/a>-and-lexicography<\/a>-defining hit record Brat. It\u2019s to be in an arena, shouting along to David Cronenberg intoning, \u201cThey are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever,\u201d as he does over and over at the end of the final track of Music, Fashion, Film<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sample from a conversation Charli XCX had with the 83-year-old Canadian body-horror auteur<\/a> last year about a health crisis in which he collapsed on the sidewalk. She asks what went through his mind in that moment: Did he think about his art? Of course not, he says. He thought about people, about life. Art is not about immortality\u2014if it lives on beyond its makers, they\u2019ll never know, and they are much better off that way. \u201cHear me assuring you that oblivion is freedom,\u201d he insists. \u201cThey are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is looped repeating and repeating the phrase until you think your head might explode, as in Cronenberg\u2019s movie Scanners<\/a>. But as it goes on, it instead starts to become oddly musical, even kind of catchy. This is thanks to the \u201cspeech-to-song illusion,\u201d a scientifically observed syndrome<\/a>: If you repeat a passage of human speech again and again, the rise and fall of the person\u2019s voice will begin to seem like a melody, until it can sound as if the person is actually singing. There\u2019s a long history<\/a> of musicians taking advantage of this effect, such as the late Scott Johnson<\/a> in his 1982 composition \u201cJohn Somebody<\/a>,\u201d or Charles Spearin of Broken Social Scene, who set his interviews with his Toronto neighbors to music on his 2009 album The Happiness Project<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On MFF, Cronenberg\u2019s at first morbid-sounding quote becomes more comforting as the cadences of the words no one lasts forever coil round and round, swaddling your ears, buoyed by bleeping and blooping harmonies from producers A.G. Cook and Finn Keane. A little longer and it becomes galvanizing, a proclamation of faith, the central litany of a whole new afterlife-free church\u2014\u201cThey are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.\u201d Take me to that revival meeting for those never to be revived!<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Aidan Zamiri<\/p>\n

Cronenberg\u2019s cameo as the only \u201cguest feature\u201d on this album is even more unexpected than that of Velvet Underground co-founder<\/a> and veteran art-rocker John Cale on XCX\u2019s last project, the soundtrack to Emerald Fennell\u2019s Wuthering Heights film<\/a>, released in February. Cale also appears in the black-and-white photo on the cover of Music, Fashion, Film, representing the first of the titular arts, along with Marc Jacobs for fashion (XCX has worked with him on campaigns before), and weirdly, for film, rather than Cronenberg, Martin Scorsese, who as far as I know has no previous link to her. Some might ask why they all have to be older white guys, but that\u2019s the flex, that XCX is asserting herself (not pictured) as their peer, as the inheritor or sum total of such an established artistic trinity.<\/p>\n

The larger mystery, though, is why an alternative-pop icon in her supposed peak period would want to end her new album on such an apparently doom-laden note. Caryn Ganz, in her Rolling Stone review<\/a>, counted 27 repetitions of Cronenberg\u2019s killer line, tying it to the ominous significance of that number<\/a> in popular-music lore. But Charli has outpaced that particular curse already, as in a week she\u2019ll be \u201cturning 34,\u201d as she sings somewhat ruefully in \u201cCamera<\/a>.\u201d Was there something about changing from cult artist to culture dominator midway through her career that got her preoccupied with death? Should listeners be concerned?<\/p>\n

No, what she\u2019s found in Cronenberg\u2019s thoughts on artistic transience is more a counterweight to the temptations of what she calls, earlier in the track, \u201cthe crushing highs and lows of ego.\u201d The repeating loop also sets the director\u2019s words as a kind of mantra. In this way, Music, Fashion, Film is a kind of very noisy meditation album, a spiritual quest to escape that self-importance. \u201cDon\u2019t fucking choke on your ego when you see me coming,\u201d she sings on the compelling \u201cPersona<\/a>,\u201d a \u201cYou\u2019re So Vain\u201d\u2013like poison-pen track except that it\u2019s so clearly directed as much at herself as anyone else (a move that undercuts the whole notion of the pop diss track, the object of so much gossip around Brat<\/a>). On \u201cCamera,\u201d she sings about how she craves performing on film because of a kind of violent dispossession that is \u201cthe only way to feel like I\u2019m not actually me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In search of those depths, XCX still proceeds, in her own patented style, by way of the superficial. She\u2019s driven to probe and undermine her relationship to the hedonistic markers of sexy-crazy-cool that have been integral to her music since she emerged as an It Girl of the U.K. underground scene as a teenager a decade-and-a-half ago. In case you doubt how much the limits of ego and fame have been on her mind since she came out of the Brat album cycle, see the long tortuous essay she published on her Substack in December about the contradictions of cool becoming commercial<\/a>. Also her more recent muddled musings about \u201canti-marketing<\/a>.\u201d And then there was her starring role in the The Moment<\/a>, an attempted satire of the Brat phenom that premiered at Sundance this winter and, like so much would-be anti-marketing, inevitably succumbs to being just marketing by other means.<\/p>\n

Here she carries on those interrogations in songs like \u201cSS26<\/a>,\u201d where she sings, referring in part to her Indian background on her mother\u2019s side, \u201cThink my politics could work as a press strategy \/ And my heritage could give me quite the USP [Unique Selling Point] \u2026 Yeah we\u2019re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell.\u201d With the title initialism standing for the current fashion season, XCX connects pop culture with the socio-political zeitgeist as she seldom has before, including perhaps the fact that the same time of year has now become the annual climate-change-fueled wildfire season: \u201cSpring-summer \u201926 \/ The world is gonna end, no hope for any of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

MFF is more effective as critique than any of her tweets, Substack entries, and mockumentaries. It lasts only a half hour, neither takes itself too seriously nor insists too hard on its jokes, and reminds both herself and us that whatever all the other trappings and traps, most of all she\u2019s just always had a fucking great time making music with her friends. It\u2019s too soon to say for sure, but personally I might even prefer the result to its celebrated fluorescent-chartreuse forerunner.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrat be damned\u201d was definitely the dare of the first single \u201cRock Music<\/a>,\u201d which came out in May and prompted abundant and overblown pearl-clutching from dance-pop devotees over its chorus, \u201cI think the dance floor is dead \/ So now we\u2019re making rock music.\u201d Even Madonna, with an album of her own to pump up, felt compelled to pipe in<\/a>. XCX was simply being cheeky, of course, declaring that she didn\u2019t want to repeat herself and doing it by blaspheming the tenets of the scene that birthed her, which in her early years held it as a truth self-evident that rock was the world\u2019s boringest music. Though given all her stylistic turns, of course she\u2019s flirted with the genre before, notably on 2014\u2019s Sucker.<\/p>\n

The rock-clich\u00e9 sendups are right there in the lyrics: \u201cWow, I\u2019m really banging my head \/ I\u2019m really hurting my neck \/ The nerve damage is real.\u201d Much more so they\u2019re in the sound. When she sings \u201crock music,\u201d Cook and Keane transform it into something more like \u201cro-#o-%o-$o-!ck music,\u201d a digitally elongated cyber-distortion of the phrase, much as they do with anything resembling a guitar riff here. But it\u2019s too bad all the humorless backlash led XCX and company to take back the provocation<\/a> as much as they did, because the rock influence really exists on MFF, in a very 2026 way.<\/p>\n

One of the breaks that this record makes with Brat\u2019s style is that it isn\u2019t based on the kind of programmed beats, MIDI riffs, and studio plugins that determined that sound. Instead, on a lot of tracks, Cook and Keane laid down the structures with live instruments\u2014guitars, drum kits, synthesizers, etc.\u2014before messing with them with a lot of more futuristic tools<\/a> (including some AI-based ones, if you want something else to fret about). \u201cWe were running around the studio with as many things plugged in as possible just doing the worst sounds, trying to find the ugliest things,\u201d they\u2019ve said of producing \u201cNo One Lasts Forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

So there is a kind of back-to-analog aspect at the core of this album, though only in a way that intersects with electronics and experimental noise\u2014not the usual domain of chart music, but the genre slurry in which a lot of music by younger artists dogpaddles now. See for instance Underscores<\/a> (April Harper Grey), who will be opening for XCX on tour this fall, and whose recent album U is an even richer exercise in grinding genre into mulch. The drawling speak-singing of a lot of XCX\u2019s vocals\u2014not nearly as AutoTuned as usual\u2014recalls recent U.K. post-punk bands like Wet Leg and Dry Cleaning, and MFF shares some territory too with the neo-indie-sleaze<\/a> wave of the past few years, though arguably XCX had been there first. And remember that she\u2019s married, as of last year (as addressed here in \u201cI\u2019m Afraid<\/a>\u201d), to drummer George Daniel of the 1975, who\u2019ve been transposing old rock gestures into new pop ones for years on end.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Isaac Butler
\n She Won an Oscar\u2014and Received Years of Backlash. Now She\u2019s Finally Stopped Trying to Play Herself.
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

There\u2019s rock \u2019n\u2019 roll attitude to the quick \u2019n\u2019 dirty concision of these songs, most of them under three minutes and willing to be mistaken for demos. Lyrically, many seem willing to get in, yelp out an idea, and get out. The track \u201cYeah,\u201d for instance, mainly reiterates the words \u201cI don\u2019t wanna\u201d over and over until XCX calls \u201cwait!\u201d and announces, \u201cnow I wanna feel it, yeah yeah.\u201d Switch the pronouns to \u201cyou\u201d and repeat. On paper, this may sound thin, but the everchanging textures and tempos turn it into a mini-drama about the unreliability of desire, of sexual or creative impulses that can turn in an instant and upend whatever we thought we knew. The title is maybe the most foundational<\/a> of rock words (the verbal comet that brought Beatlemania on its tail<\/a>), and its repeated use of wanna reminds me of the Ramones\u2019 \u00a0talismanic use of that compound verb<\/a> (\u201cI Wanna Be Sedated,\u201d \u201cI Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,\u201d \u201cI Wanna Live,\u201d etc.) as well as Kim Gordon\u2019s refrain in Sonic Youth\u2019s \u201cKool Thing<\/a>\u201d (\u201cI don\u2019t wanna \/ I don\u2019t think so\u201d).<\/p>\n

In interviews, XCX has said that she\u2019d been planning to take a break from music\u2014she does have scads of film roles to do<\/a>\u2014until she was overcome with a sudden urge, which might partly explain the brevity. But I think there\u2019s a more deliberate choice here not to give the public what it wants, post-Brat, to play harder-to-get. But that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s as paltry or tossed-off as it might initially seem. Rather than developing these songs by means of traditional craft, with more complete narratives and arrangements that progress in harmonic complexity, the labor here is in the microscopic details, the way that Cook and Keane are constantly mutating the timbres and textures of sounds from second to second.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Watching TV Used to Feel Like Hanging With Your Friends. Then Something Happened That Changed Everything.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of the Most Popular Sitcoms of All Time Has a Bizarre New Spin-Off. It\u2019s Surprisingly Great.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

One of my favorite tracks, \u201cCard Declined<\/a>,\u201d is on one level a commonplace critique of consumerism: \u201cLet\u2019s go shopping \/ I\u2019ll buy a handbag \u2026 I\u2019ll buy some jewelry, a personality.\u201d It grows sadder: \u201cA Mah Jong sofa \/ A new apartment \u2026 A whole new life \/ Card declined.\u201d But what draws out the emotion is the way the music evolves. An electric guitar riff redolent of early synth-punk such as the Normal\u2019s \u201cWarm Leatherette<\/a>\u201d becomes more and more processed, till it sounds like a CD skipping (if you remember that sound), then develops a further stutter, then a bass level, a high harmony, and a sustained horn-like synth accompaniment. Then it begins stopping and surging like a stalled engine, with XCX\u2019s vocals otherwise seeming abandoned to a cappella. Eventually that sound palette is replaced by a chamber-rock wash, like a distant echo of the Cale-era Velvet Underground, and the whole song repeats itself with XCX singing up an octave. Then that stalls, and finally stops dead, until the song switches into a completely different, pop-rock section that\u2019s a miniature version of a song that was originally the B-side to \u201cRock Music\u201d<\/a>\u2014proclaiming \u201cI keep on thinking bout you every single day and night\u201d to 1960s-styles organ flourishes, but only for about 40 seconds. All that in 3:28.<\/p>\n

These micro-dynamics are redoubled in the way sounds shift from track to track, making the album much better heard as a whole than song by song. If you weren\u2019t hooked by the advance singles, try listening to it instead as an extended 30-minute suite. That makes me less impatient with the weaker songs, like \u201c2007<\/a>\u201d (I can\u2019t decide if it\u2019s actual or mock nostalgic) and her sweet but over-earnest tribute to collaborator Cook, \u201cMagic Metal Montana<\/a>\u201d \u2014if MFF really were a rock album, the latter would be the schlocky power ballad. This subordination of the individual units to the whole is a sort of model of the kind of enlightened perspective XCX is striving toward, one might almost say.<\/p>\n

Almost, that is, if one weren\u2019t worried about choking on one\u2019s ego. Nothing lasts forever, life\u2019s but a walking shadow, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and so on, but Music, Fashion, Film does make a fair go of its half-hour\u2019s strut upon the stage, even if it\u2019s actually a catwalk to hell.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":566456,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,1424,61,60,270,278,641,640],"class_list":["post-566455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-fashion","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-music","tag-pop","tag-rock"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/566456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}