Charli XCX: Music, Fashion, Film

★★★★

They are dead. They are gone. No one lasts forever. This mantra, spoken by director David Cronenberg, is the curtain drop of Charli XCX’s riotously anticipated eighth studio album, Music, Fashion, Film.

Chopped up and layered with the stereo bouncing it from one ear to another, it stutters on for well over a minute – a brittle auditory dirge that dissolves the album before it. It’s a fitting end for the album, which sees Charlotte Aitchison confront her post-Brat demons and excavate her relationship to art, her ego, her public persona, her career, her marriage and more.

Few albums this year will be scrutinised and compared so fiercely to their predecessor as Music, Fashion, Film with Brat, and that’s understandable. Brat was a cultural phenomenon, slathering everything from runways to political campaigns with its acidic, lime-green wash. It was the British artist’s masterpiece – after 10 years as largely an underground, cult pop figure, Brat was an extraordinary, rare collision of a fully realised artistic vision with commercial success.

But it came with strings: Charli revealed the frenetic live shows left her with serious nerve damage in her neck and a “traumatic” relationship with performing. The mental fallout was chronicled in her 2026 film The Moment, a meta-mockumentary of the Brat era in which that artistic vision is sacrificed for cringe brand deals and endless promo. Brat is dead, long live Brat.

Music, Fashion, Film’s ending is a clear statement, and so is the beginning. As she did early on Brat with Club Classics, Rock Music is the prologue for Music, Fashion, Film – you know, it’s the single in which Charli famously declares that the “dance floor is dead” and “now we’re making rock music”, through walls of staticky distortion. The track predictably launched a thousand boring thinkpieces; of course the dance floor isn’t dead – but Brat is.

When Rock Music arrived as Music, Fashion, Film’s first single, many missed Charli’s sarcastic deadpan lyrics (“Wow, I’m really banging my head”) and assumed the album would be a drastic rock pivot. It’s not.

Sure, Charli and her constant, close collaborators of AG Cook and Finn Keane have largely swapped out the manic synths for dirgy guitars and thick bass (check the shuddering Card Declined), but this still sits firmly in the Charli XCX pop universe. It’s also abrupt: the full album runs to a tick over 30 minutes, with many of the tracks hitting around the two-minute mark (apart from the final send-off with Cronenberg, No One Lasts Forever, which runs to nearly six).

There’s no time to waste, and Charli doesn’t. Rock Music quickly sweeps Brat out of the way for SS26, where Charli walks the runway and contemplates promo (“Think my politics could work as a press strategy/ And my heritage could give me quite the USP”) while the apocalypse hangs overhead and the warm bass curls around her vocals. The abrasive Card Declined sees her trying to buy a new personality without success; Camera is a stream of consciousness about her stepping into acting and the terror and rush of throwing yourself into something new; 2007 is a jittering snapshot of performance through phones.

Lyrically, much of Music, Fashion, Film traces back to Brat standout I Think About It All the Time: run-on sentences, half-formed thoughts and conversations that sound like voice notes recorded in the early hours. Yeah, Wink Wink, and Persona contemplate various angles of ego-death and reinvention, while highlight Magic Metal Montana is a heartfelt love letter to close friend AG Cook and the joy of making music together.

Art, the importance of it, the purity of it, the trials you put yourself through to make it, is the heart of Music, Fashion, Film. Rock Music was an ironic wink, but it also contained a striking truth: “The nervе damage is real/ But it’s the only way to feel somеthing/ Hurt yourself/ Yeah, maybe jump off the stage/ I hope they catch you today/ But if they don’t, it’s okay.”

When the world is crumbling around you, when nothing is going to last forever, throwing yourself into what you love is the only way forward.

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