“We’re so inspired/Basically all of the time,” Charli XCX sings on “Rock Music,” the opening track of her new album, Music, Fashion, Film. She’s talking about herself and her friends, but the conspicuous pause between the lines is telling, and what initially sounds like a playfully cocky flex becomes a kind of question.
That assertion of selfhood and immediately doubling back on it, doubting and probing, is indicative of the album as a whole, which arrives in the shadow of 2024’s zeitgeist-defining Brat. Music, Fashion, Film is at once a reckoning with the attention that Charli has received over the past couple of years and a pivot away from the sound of an album that may just be the apotheosis of hyperpop.
This is a rock album in much the same way Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is an Emily Brontë adaptation or The Moment is a music documentary. The album features guitars, yes, but it was cooked up in the lab by Charli and co-producers A.G. Cook and Finn Keane. Each of the songs is infatuated with guitar fuzz, employing sampled shreds as loops and puzzle pieces rather than riding out riffs or giving over to the chaos and unruliness of a conventional live band.
Anguished blasts of guitar mark “I’m Afraid,” blinkered filigrees dance across “Camera,” and the guitar—or a synth that sounds an awful lot like one—mimics Charli’s voice on “Persona.” It’s all expertly orchestrated, with sounds layered and distorted on tracks such as “2007” in a way that’s somehow pleasingly melodic despite the jaggedness and harshness of the individual elements.
The album’s genre-defying nature is certainly more than self-aware. “The dance floor is dead,” Charli cheekily declares on “Rock Music.” Charli’s songwriting is as tartly funny as ever, especially when she’s apologetically undercutting her position on various things. “I’m just saying that for effect,” she admits on “Wink Wink” after coming out of the gate blustering about fucking someone’s dad. On “Camera,” she’s so uncomfortable with her own musings about the thrill she gets from performing on screen that she whispers, “Fucking shoot me.”
Sorting out what’s ironic and what’s genuine on a Charli XCX album is part of the fun, but, for all its teasing, Music, Fashion, Film contains several moments of straightforward introspection. A diaristic bit of rock opera, “I’m Afraid” is a somewhat clumsy and obvious admission that Charli has some uncertainty about her marriage to the 1975 drummer George Daniel—that it isn’t one of unadulterated bliss. More successful is “Magic Metal Montana,” a sweet ode to Cook whose title evokes the band Suicide but is actually closer to Spoon.
With the coyness of its rollout and the brevity of its tracklist (the album clocks in at just over half an hour), it would be easy to mistake Music, Fashion, Film for a bit of a lark. There’s only so much self-conscious commentary to pack into songs that feel like jokes within jokes, and only so much art that’s about itself, that one can take. But it’s ultimately wry and smartly meta. And though its closing track, “No One Lasts Forever,” is a bit of a musical retread, it features a mini-monologue about artistic legacy from none other than David fucking Cronenberg, and perhaps Charli’s finest, truest observation: “You need to discover that feeling/Of the crushing highs and lows of ego/Where one minute you know you’re the worst/And the next minute you know you’re better/Than everyone in the room/But know that nothing’s gonna last forever.”
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