It takes a lot of nerve to place Martin Scorsese, John Cale, and Marc Jacobs on the cover art for a new album called Music, Fashion, Film. It’s three titans of three mediums that permeate our culture, and not a single frame of Charli xcx herself. The absence is the tell. A less interesting artist stages this cover as a coronation: I belong among the greats, look who agrees. Charli, fresh off the now-seminal Brat and its ensuing cultural wave, has earned the right to make that claim.
Music, Fashion, Film is not that album. Instead, Charli uses her seventh album to interrogate her own career and wrestle with the cost of pursing artistic greatness — especially set against the depersonalization of fame and, in the case of “SS26” and the David Cronenberg-featuring “No One Lasts Forever,” the meaninglessness of it all. It’s less a victory lap than a war between the persona she built and the self underneath it, between honesty, irony, earnestness, absurdity, and optimism. Using a rock-oriented palette and once again focusing on subverting expectations, Charli xcx crafts an album that destabilizes itself as often as it soars, resulting in an exceptional new chapter in her discography.
More than any of her projects so far, Charli pulls the rug out from underneath her audience. That instinct was apparent in the rollout itself: “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music” set off months of speculation when it surfaced in her album-teasing British Vogue profile, prompting Charli to publicly wave off the “rock album” narrative as tabloid noise. But that quote turned out to be the thesis of “Rock Music” and a troll, all in one breath. The bait-and-switch goes deeper than a good bit: “Rock Music” reveals that Charli is less interested in actually making rock music than in performing the idea of it, using genre as costume to dramatize themes of stardom and greatness.
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There’s a tension produced by the earnestness of Charli’s lyrics and the irony-tinged performance of “Rock Music,” and that tension sustains throughout the album. This theme shows up most often in the choruses, where a refrain is repeated and glitched out like it ran into a 404 error. She fractures the chorus of “2007” to the point where it’s a mess of DJ scratches and consonants. The refrain of “Card Declined” is a collage of commands and details that highlights the absurdity of Charli’s quest to hide behind her clothing. And she’s not making “rock music,” she’s making “ro-o-o-o-o-o-ock… music!,” a line delivered so playfully that even the glitch on her voice feels human.
It’s also worth noting that the style of rock music employed on Music, Fashion, Film refers back to Charli, too. Where Brat took inspiration from the brash, late 2000s electropop that would go on to empower Charli’s early career, the new album finds her taking cues from the 2000s “indie landfill” era of British alternative rock, where many of these songs feel like Skins soundtrack entries resized. “2007” references this nostalgic moment in her adolescence explicitly but positions it in conflict: “Pictures on the sofa become pictures on the screen/ All from your apartmеnt, you can shine bright like a star,” she sings, setting the modern scenario of achieving TikTok fame against an alt-rock instrumental that echoes the innocence and purity of 2007-era Charli.
